Brooklyn
Daniel Christensen
Brownstone stoops beneath my window hold the city by its toes,
Here, steel and brick chipped hearthstones lie upon each other in unbroken rank,
Beneath, the earth stamped down by tarmac gangs that dug our cellars past the bones,
Moth wings tap against street lamps in hollow staccato
And this borough remembers every breath the tombstones have forgot,
To scrawl across their narrow margins in names and dates and loved ones fond recollections,
Son, wife, father, friend, is the name they were called, but souls born here in rivers
Of noisome light are still here, drawing a thumb and forefinger across horizons
Dreamt full of this urban sprawl from nothing, these souls slamming the grills
Down over the corner markets at sunset,
Bridges and tunnels and woven thread,
Blood and fireflies and baking bread,
Unity is our strength
And here, amidst our streets bathed in rotating hawk-lights, shoulders hunched,
Against the bite of a sleeting rain, shirtless summer scamps blasted by fire hydrant spray,
Windowsill gardens held above the jaws of dogs howling at dusk,
Street prophets wail the daily jazz, defying the geometries of time,
Beating down the sun with our fists to draw the curtains over our toils
And each law holds its own memory in chord, the long bay, with its moody eyes
Straining toward the berths of every possible horizon,
My Brooklyn lives in the bones of me, where I was forged to remember,
Each of these eras of frustration, that weltered us in blood and bonds
