Joseph Shapiro reported on NPR that Sarah McSweeney died in an hospital; where she was denied treatment. "As Hospitals Fear Being Overwhelmed By COVID-19, Do The Disabled Get The Same Access?" How do we get beyond the silence to understand the plight of people with disabilities? Distance learning technologies might motivate more students to express their thoughts and get their ideas out. A cold winter is settling in as people react to this virus. Voices need to be heard. Teachers need to gain the trust of their students. That takes time in the midst of terrible times.

Voices Engaged

The students' voices
need to be seriously considered
as part of the school's curriculum
and governance.

Schools provide shelter,
while classes conceive and realize projects.
Poetry presents voices engaged.

Many factions segregated in NYC came together in Streams.

Accept everyone as worthy,
and appreciated for their art.
Give everyone the opportunity
to write poetry.

Reread and rewrite.

Chrylust

NYC Green Market

Barbara and I were active members in, and officers of, The West Village Committee concerned with resisting large corporate and government power brokers.  One of our major battles in the 70s was the fight against Westway.   By the mid 1970's, the West Village Committee, in an effort to support residents on the bank of the Hudson sponsored the Gaansevort Street Market.

Bill Bowser was president of the Committee and Barry Benipe was the director of the organization seting up green markets throughout the city.

In the early eighties Barbara became the manager of the green market.  Every Friday night, before the Saturday market we'd open the fire hydrants to clear the blood from the meat market off Gansvoort Street.  We would erect police barriers, to keep out cars.  Once a heavy blue barrier fell on Barbara's foot; and she's lived with the physical damage for decades. 

I worked with John Gozinsky an organic farmer.  Anton Wagonhoffer sold flowers.  McGowan was the meat farmer I studied under his father who taught classics at Syracuse University.

School Dreams

public education in inclusive classrooms

Exclusive settings are characterized by class, religion, and geography.  Inclusive settings are open to all who want to attend in a publicly funded community space.

A public school may house day care (accommodating student parents), pre-kindergarten for toddlers, elementary school for children learning to socialize, high school for adolescents, secondary school for advanced studies, remedial programs addressing student needs, adult education, senior citizen recreation, family support centers; while providing a home for arts or recreational organizations.

Education is a guided journey from cradle to grave.

Excerpt from "Lyric"*

Wait for me my wild companions.
Let us slice this stagnant air.
For if nature can yet carve her canyons
then let her thunders lead us where
Aurora lives in liquid skies
and silence sings in silken sighs.

* I wrote Lyric for the Scribblers in 1973.  It was set to music by Mary Grace Bookhardt at the Pit, a coffee house in the basement of the church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on West End Avenue and West 86th Street in Manhattan. 

Riding the Greenwich Street Elevated Railway (1873)

(re-imagining Walt Whitman)

Greenwich Street below me! I search the railway riders’ faces;
Half an hour before the sun sets behind that guy’s head! I observe his face.
On the elevated rails, trains are pulled above Greenwich Street by cables that claw at the cars. This is more curious to me than you suppose;
And you, guys and dolls, that shall travel by steam engine uptown and down, a millennium from now, are more to me, and more in my musings, than you might suppose.
Every station, that falls into disrepair, greets me with my future;
I’m dragged through the ebony street at dusk, looking for a blade of grass between the cobblestone paving, the muck and mire covering the earth, filling the riverbank and burying the dead;
The certainty of arrivals and departures.

Others will enter the railway turnstile, and ride from Battery Place to the farmer’s market at Gansevoort Street;
Others will smell the butter and cheese exchange and hear the din of the clam and catfish vendors;
Others will gaze the length of the iron rails;
Others will see the boarding houses and rowhouses of Greenwich Village;
A millennium hence, others will look over the lordly Hudson from the highway as they commute, the sun half an hour high;
A millennium, or ever so many millenia hence, others will enjoy the sunset over the landfills in the river.

  Just as you feel when you look on the railway, so I felt;
Just as you fear the meanness of the railway, the ashes and sparks of the train’s raucous roll, I was afeared;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the rushing hours, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numbered trains, and the great protruding headlights fixed in front, I look’d.

Many a time as the railway rode up Greenwich Street, I watched the windows on townhouses and tenements—
I peered in windows lit by kerosene and whale oil.
I watched oscillating bodies in the glistening yellow light, their exposed parts and the rest left in strong shadow.
I saw slow horsecar wheels turn in circles, while the city edged gradually northward.
I saw trains approach, casting their red sparks and black ashes over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.
I too walk’d the irregular pattern of Greenwich Village streets, and bathed in the Hudson’s waters;
I too thought I’d float forever in that dreamlike solution;
It is not from you alone that crazy ideas emerge,
Those dark ideas arose from me as well;
My noble confessions, were they not in reality laughably evil?
I knew what it was to feel guilty;
I was confused and ashamed.
I felt insufferably dirty, dressed in lies, loved to loafe, swift to steal, and nurse bitter grudges…

But I was a New Yorker, friendly and proud!
Loud voices called me by my deep and inscrutable singular name; hep cats saw me approaching or passing on Bleecker Street, Washington Square, or sitting in Pfaff’s;

I roamed the freight yards of the Hudson River Railroad, the umbilicus of the Empire City.
Now I am curious what sight can ever be more stately and admirable to me than the heavy industry and many residencies of Manhattan?
Belfries and fire warning towers in the sun-set, patterns molded on the cornices of factories;
The iron workers toiling at their fires, the terra cotta manufactured in the twilight, and the carpenters in lumber yards; Curious lives amid the granite works and plaster mills.
The voices of residents I love call out to me from tenement windows that I pass.
What is more raucous than the cables whose claws jolt the railway car in loops, driven by steam engines in cellars adjacent to these elevated rails?
The distilleries above Tenth Street lead me north to you, they pour their turpentine and camphene into street lamps guiding me to you.

Roll on, railway! Roll on rails over ground and gravel, tunnel through the hills!
Dig on, you diggers, dig like badgers, earthworms and groundhogs!
Out gorgeous tunnels and on rails lit by the sun-set! spark your splendor for me, or the men and women generations after me;
Cross along the Erie and the Hudson, countless crowds of commuters!
Stand up, tall homes of Manhattan!—stand up, pulchritudinous palisades of New Jersey!
Suspend here and everywhere, elevated rail way line!

Be firm, rail over Manhattan, to support those who sleep on the railway, yet haste with the hasting current;
Fly on, falcons! fly sideways, or perne in a gyre high in the air;
Melt the winter snows, you iron rails!
Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the cracks in the glass about the reflected shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the railway windows;
Come down, trains from Babylon on the Hudson! pass east or west, locomotives, gyrating engines, black cylindric bodies!
Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses;
Thrive, cities! haul your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rails – be the Meat Market for the World.