Heaven's Gate™

by: Ken Siegelman, Brooklyn Poet Laureate

She was always less a passageway
From island to island,
Than a portal through time and space;
Much the way that Heaven’s Gate
Was seen by immigrants in tenements and clapboard shacks
Crowded into cobble streets on either side
that fell inside her shadow...
Just in reach it seemed of some divinity
Above the chimney smoke and mad congestion of the boats
Anting like the traffic of today;
A place where the sun seemed closer than the clouds
by day
and where the moon gave access to the stars
Arranged like souls they waked
Telling them it was all okay on the other side...
A pick and hammer generation who knew the cost
Of human loss when filling firm its pilings;
Anchored in the shifting mud and forceful eddies
Of a river that challenged its completion...
Even now, her elephantine legs
Of smoothed morse stones
Grandmother on our Brooklyn trains
Where old woman shoe their determination to stand the ride
With heavy stockings rolled and knotted at their knees;
There are no dainty models that substitute for endurance.
I wonder when its engineers
Caught up in the mechanics of revised designs
Came to see the larger picture
of the men who arced her lattice cables
Looking like their Brooklyn backyard grapevines
Where they toasted Sundays with the silent smiles
Of those who glimpsed at Heaven’s Gates
While they were still alive.

Ken Siegelman, Brooklyn Poet Laureate