by Mark Fischweicher
Years ago the ground floor of our building flooded
May have been Sandy or Irene
Up from Florida
Just another unpredictable
torrential tourist.
Mathew never made it
Past the Carolinas.
Now I walk along the East River,
the walk closed below
The Brooklyn Bridge.
They’re raising it, they say,
widening it.
What with the river widening itself
and Manhattan sinking,
under the weight of its skyscrapers,
meanwhile, the Bikers and joggers breeze by
Soccer and softball
filling the fields
along the drive
while the water laps
at the sea wall.
Ferries running up and down the river.
Tugboats, tour boats,
sight see-ers, and sloops.
And here along the walk,
They, almost all of them Chinese,
with rods tied to the railing,
Fishing for bass and porgy
And selling it, they say, on the street
In Chinatown.
Marshland,
the Lenape landed their canoes here
Good fishing still
I suppose
The ancient ones gone
Having lasted hundreds of years
Street names remind us of their land;
Spruce Street, Pine Street, Cedar, Beech.
Once you could have walked up Maiden Lane
or its previous incarnation, Maagde Paatje
to get here, the footpath
used by lovers to walk along the “pebbly brook”
that ran from Nassau Street
to the East River,
where wives and daughters washed their linen.
Or think back to 1712,
The New York , that’s right, The New York
Slave Revolt, which happened here as well.
A group of more than twenty black slaves,
gathered on the night of April 6th,
and set fire to abuilding on Maiden Lane
near Broadway,
according to city historians,
killing nine, injuring a half-dozen more.
Colonials arrested seventy. Six committed suicide,
21 were sentenced to death
including one woman with child.
Twenty were burned to death.
One was executed on a breaking wheel.
Or think further back
to the massacre
at Corlear’s Hook
named after the Van Corlear family,
17ty century Dutch landowners,
and the geographic bend in the shoreline
that had the shape of a hook
where forty Wecquaesgeek Indians
of all ages and genders were slaughtered
as they slept, by the Dutch,
at the end of February in 1643
Just a short walk up from “De Smit’s Vly,”
“The Smith’s Valley”
where Cornelis Clopper
had a blacksmith shop’
a central stopping point for country people
to stop and shod their horses and socialize
And so I walk along the shore
Thru time, thru our collective history
Waiting for tornadoes once again.
Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School of Poets.