Ode to Brooklyn Bridge Bringing Us to World by Daniela Gioseffi
for Marty Markowitz, Lover of All Things Brooklyn, May 24th,
2003


Oh, steel harp and granite altar of the fury fused!
How could mere toil align your choiring strings?
One poet called you "a cat arching your back over the river,"
but I say you're a Gothic Shrine forged of Old World granite
and New World steel-graceful grandmother of all suspension bridges--
beginning of skyscraping New York, wearing your diamond necklace
across the flowing neck of the swirling East River.
You peopled Brooklyn, uniting the Island of Manhattan,
with its Native American name, to Breukelen-a Dutch word, meaning
"Broken Land,"
of the most international city of cities. Brooklyn was the center of
all moral life in America
when you were planned, when Reverand Beecher ran his underground railroad
at The Plymouth Church and his kin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, converting thousands to the anti-slavery cause,
and Whitman wrote "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Democratic Vistas!"
You Great Old Lady of the Harbor, glowing your twinkling lights in
the dark waters.
You were a monumental feat that marked the dawning of our technological
age.
Hart Crane saw you as symbolic of modern science which would cure all ills
when he wrote his ode to you sitting in the same windows from which Washington
and Emily Roebling viewed their stupendous architecture rise in the
dream of his dead father.
We citizens of Brooklyn, living on the great head of the Whale's body
of Long Island
stretching her fluky tail into the vast Atlantic, resolve to never
let you be "tolled."
Crossing you is our right! You are the Great Bridge of your century,
the one that proved the worth of Roebling's steel cable
and made our elevator buildings rise into a rich diversity of lives.
You are the bridge in Arthur's Miller's play, dinosaur of Mayakowsky's
poem,
vision of Lorca's Poeta en Nuevo York, sleek arches of Georgia
O'Keefe's painting.
You embody the meaning of our lives, transverse our mighty river
where Liberty held
her torch aloft to our immigrant forebears. You take us to Wall
Street and City Hall
and give us the meaning of our history. Yours explains our lives as
you smile across our river!
You are the New World come from, and blended with, the Old:
devastated Native Americans,
European immigrants, unwilling slaves from Africa, Jews escaping tyranny,
and new arrivals from the Caribbean have crossed you full of hope
and come to build our Borough into the richest culture on earth, full
of people of all nations
blended into the life of one city, our Brooklyn entered from our
Great Bridge.
"Eighth Wonder of the World," our grand old emblem!