Ken Siegelman-Our Poet Laureate of Brooklyn
by Alan Braverman

Webster's definition of the poet, from the Greek poietes and the Latin poeta being one who "displays imaginative power and beauty of thought and language and the essence of this term is displayed in the writings of Ken Siegelman whose frail body is only a vessel for an enduring spirit, a voice that encapsulates the very essence of what is Brooklyn, a borough, a state of mind, a multi-cultural quilt, a metaphor, an idiom, a City of Souls from "Bensonhurst" fig tree yard and ungiving vegetable gardens, to a backroom of a Greenpoint bar in "Father's Mind" and "Alex" in Coney Island who missed his pigeons but there was no poetry in my father's home in "Longfellow in Brooklyn" from the "Rockaway Lullaby" where white shirt men with bulging guts walked the street as Silhouettes and Shadows as the dawn is always cast as "Broken Toys" in the dumpster left ajar since New Years Day while a "Lost Island" surged in cycled flames as Coney Island "GoldfIsh" swim in my memories of a lost sister born with a cleft palette where an "Island of Hatchlings" slither out of eggs of mossy thicket, the "City Kills" as July salts the Brooklyn sidewalks with a hundred mangled torsos and the "Barren Yard" where everything was seen as weeds so the "Carousels" the horses I remember as a child seem to prance in pain, to the "Clusters of Lilies" while walking in an open field.

Keep on walking Ken and writing and inspiring us to be poets as Pablo Neruda's words resonate "Poetry is an act peace. Peace goes into making the poet as flour goes into the making of bread".