Walking on the Brooklyn Bridge

          November 19, 2000


If fire would descend from this dull sky
and touch your towered arches
who could be surprised or wonder
more than now, when without flames
you draw us up above apartment blocks
and domed and spired business worlds
to breathe silence and the sacred air.

Where concrete ends and wood begins
I see cords of steel cross your open arches
which become glassless panes of air
almost as iridescent as Piper’s window
or Chagall’s Hadassah glass,
guides for failing minds to climb
off the oaken boards and up
webbed and sturdy wire ropes
into the flaring, into vision’s flames.

Here we see what cash or crime cannot define,
what Roebling saw although he could not see
or walk as I now walk
in this temple of the open air
at one with every brother and sister
who walks or runs or cycles on,
enchanted by the sight as firm and fluid
as light, as freedom in the making:

this vision cannot be watched on screens,
this is the vision we must build and build,
that undulant suspension rocks in us,
the new boards that must replace the failing
rotting ones so we can still in the changes
walk and fall not, can still ascend the boards
to greet the fire falling through the wind.


John Kryder


Poems