old mulberry street

mulberry194001 — Image: newarkstreets.com

From Chestnut Street north went
        that road of our childhood,
Fascinating all the way
From the tavern owned by one
        classmate’s folks,
Past a couple of factories
Fish market, shoemaker’s shop,
        hardware, grocery stores, laundry,
And a drug store with several
        large, shining globes,
Filled with liquid—red, yellow,
        green, blue—
And the candy stores where a
        penny bought
Lafayettes, lollipops, licorice, or
        Mary Jane,
Or even a grab-bag of assorted
Sweet, crunchy, chewy morsels,
Or a nickel bar of brown or pink or white taffy;
And on through Chinatown
Where restaurants served strange foods,
To the markets which
We could only visit on Saturdays.
The Markets! outdoor extravaganzas
Of meats, eggs, produce, fish, bread,
And, wondrous bright,
A great revolving cylinder
        roasting peanuts—
What a smell! and what a taste!
Hot peanuts, m-m-m, delicious!
Oh! what an adventure a
        trip to the markets—
        of Mulberry Street was!
Through busy crowds of people all intent,
And maybe bumping us about,
But it did not bother us.
The joy of being in the
        middle of it all
Went home with us to
        be savored
Till we went that way again.

Alma Flagg’s trip up “old Mulberry Street” can be traced (in reverse order) through the listings in Price & Lee’s 1940 Newark city directory, of which a small section is shown here. The poem is found in Flagg’s collection Lines, colors, and more (1998).

young soul

by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

First, feel, then feel, then
read, or read, then feel, then
fall, or stand, where you
already are. Think
of your self, and the other
selves . . . think
of your parents, your mothers
and sisters, your bentslick
father, then feel, or
fall, on your knees
if nothing else will move you,
                                            then read
                                            and look deeply
                                            into all matters
                                            come close to you
                                            city boys—
                                            country men

                                            Make some muscle
                                            in your head, but
                                            use the muscle
                                            in yr heart

“Young Soul” appeared in Black Magic, a collection of poems composed between 1961 and 1967.

old jail on new street

by Margaret Tsuda

The old jail on New Street
has what looks
ironically like a
sedate, white painted
front door.
Over it a funny
electric clock with a
gaudy neon rim
keeps time.
Two wide and handsome
magnolia trees frame the walk
on either side.

But
when I drive by from work
sometimes the van is
in the yard and the
young men
the handcuffed young men
climb awkwardly down.

They can’t see the clock
from the side yard and
they don’t look at
the trees.

What do they see?

What would I see
if I climbed out of
a prison van
hunched and handcuffed?

Defeat
despair and a
no-future world–
apprehension filling
my belly like wet cement.

Muggers
addicts
car thieves and
drunks, yes.
But, men, too!

O, God!
There is more to
being a man
than this!

There’s joy to being a man!
There’s peace to being a man!
There’s confidence in
achievement
security in oneself and
loving and sharing.

But, who will tell them?
O, God! who
can
tell them?

Every day
another
van-load climbs down
hunched and
handcuffed beside
wide magnolia trees.

There must be
someone
to tell them!
Is it
you
or me?

Parts of the old Essex County Jail on New Street (including the administration building, pictured above) still stand, in a ruinous condition, one hundred eighty years after it was built.

Margaret Tsuda’s “Old Jail on New Street” first appeared in the Christian Science Monitor of March 29, 1971, and was republished in her collection Cry love aloud (1972).

we stand

by Nathan Wright Jr.

“Let me be free, or let me die!”
A thousand lips across the years
Have raised this valiant cry.

Thus cried brave men across the sea;
So Patrick Henry did proclaim.
They wanted liberty.

The plea today is still the same;
Freedom denied, means there’s no life
That’s worthy of the name.

Today the people of Montgomery,
Inspired by Martin King of Gandhi fame,
Walk to fulfill their destiny.

Where peace comes at oppression’s cost
No peace can ever be but strife.
We stand . . . or all is lost.

As a young man Nathan Wright Jr. participated in the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, a precursor to the Freedom Rides challenging segregation in the South. Twenty years later, as director of urban work for the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, he chaired the first National Conference on Black Power, held in Newark in July 1967.

“We stand,” from his collection The Song of Mary (1958), has the postscript “Written on the first anniversary of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, December 1956.”

mary’s valentines

by Frederick H. Pilch

When the short wintry day was o’er,
A comely maiden sat before
A table, where lay spread
Three valentines, of style and hue
Quite dainty,—forth the first she drew,
And laughingly she read:
“Oh! Lady, I would be a flower,
To die in fragrance on your breast;
Or a chaste star, at midnight hour
To kiss your eyelids while you rest;
Or a soft breeze, at mid-day fair
To lift the ringlets of your hair
And whisper tender wishes there.”

‘Twas signed with a romantic name;
She knew who sent it just the same,
And fixed it in her mirror’s frame,
In future to amuse;
Then smiling sweetly, took apart
A second “herald of the heart,”
And found amid that work of art
These verses to peruse:
“Fair Damsel, would that you might need
A champion bold, or warrior true,
By brave emprize to win the meed
Of laurel wreaths, and smiles from you;
Against all comers I would stand,
Your doughty knight with sword in hand,
To do, or die, at your command.”

This was subscribed by “Roderick Dhu,”
Full well the clerkly hand she knew,
And that “a cloth-yard shaft” he drew
That ne’er was dipped in gore;—
She put this one away with care,
Then with an interested air
Took up the last epistle there,
And these lines pondered o’er:
“Dear Mary, I have loved you long,
And I will love you evermore,
My heart is stout, my arm is strong,
I am not versed in lover’s lore.
Nor flowing phrases can I bring,
But if my suit is no vain thing
I pray you wear this little ring.”

She kissed the name below,—twas “John,”
And hid it where her brooch went on,—
Or somewhere thereabout,—
The circlet fitted very well,
And in a reverie she fell,
Until the light went out.

A Newark attorney, Pilch included this poem in his volume Homespun verses, published in 1882.

the unfinished work

by Joseph Fulford Folsom

The crowd was gone, and to the side
Of Borglum’s Lincoln, deep in awe,
I crept. It seem’d a mighty tide
Within those aching eyes I saw.

“Great heart,” I said, “why grieve alway?
The battle’s ended, and the shout
Shall ring forever and a day,—
Why sorrow yet, or darkly doubt?”

“Freedom,” I plead, “so nobly won
For all mankind, and equal right,
Shall with the ages travel on
Till time shall cease, and day be night.”

No answer—then; but up the slope,
With broken gait, and hands in clench,
A toiler came, bereft of hope,
And sank beside him on the bench.

Image: The Star-Ledger — Image: Newark Public Library via The Star-Ledger

Joseph Fulford Folsom was a Presbyterian pastor and local historian, as well as a poet. He wrote a regular column on historical matters for the Newark Evening News, signing himself The Lorist. His poem on the Lincoln statue was included in the 1912 volume The Newark Lincoln.

to borglum’s seated statue of abraham lincoln

by Charlotte Brewster Jordan

Alone, upon the broad low bench he sits,
From carping foes and friends alike withdrawn;
With tragic patience for the spirit dawn
He waits, yet through the deep set eyes hope flits
As he the back unto the burden fits.
Within this rugged man of brains and brawn
The quiv’ring nation’s high powered currents drawn,
As waves of love and kindness he transmits.

O prairie poet, prophet, children’s friend!
Great brained, great willed, great hearted man and true,
May we, like thee, in prayerful patience plod
With courage toward the wished for, peaceful end!
May we thy helpful friendliness renew,
Thou war worn soul communing with thy God!

This celebration of Newark’s beloved Lincoln statue, first printed in the New York Sun, was reprinted in The Book of Lincoln (1919) compiled by Mary Wright-Davis.

the stroke of justice

by Lyman Whitney Allen

The hour was come, the Nation’s crucial hour;
        A crisis of the world, a turn of time;
                The ages’ hope and dream.
And one undaunted soul, sinewed with power,
        Freedom’s anointed, rose to height sublime,
                Imperial and supreme;

And, lifting high o’er groaning multitude
        His sovereign sceptre, smote with such a stroke
                The chains of centuries,
That earth was shaken to its farthest rood;
        That millioned manacles asunder broke,
                And myriad properties

Became, in one immortal moment,—men;
        Free with the free in all the rounded earth;
                Redeemed by martyr blood;
To stand with faces to the light again,
        Attaining, through their resurrection birth,
                To human brotherhood.

From 1889 to 1916 Lyman Whitney Allen was pastor of South Park Presbyterian Church where Lincoln, on the way to his first inauguration in 1861, had made brief remarks before a throng of Newarkers. Allen’s book-length prize poem Abraham Lincoln, from which this excerpt is taken, first appeared in the New York Herald of December 15, 1895.

chinese new year

by Lynda Hull

The dragon is in the street dancing beneath windows
pasted with colored squares, past the man
who leans into the phone booth’s red pagoda, past
crates of doves and roosters veiled

until dawn. Fireworks complicate the streets
with sulphur as people exchange gold
and silver foil, money to appease ghosts
who linger, needy even in death. I am

almost invisible. Hands could pass through me
effortlessly. This is how it is
to be so alien that my name falls from me, grows
untranslatable as the shop signs,

the odors of ginseng and black fungus that idle
in the stairwell, the corridor where
the doors are blue mouths ajar. Hands
gesture in the smoke, the partial moon

of a face. For hours the soft numeric
click of mah-jongg tiles drifts
down the hallway where languid Mai trails
her musk of sex and narcotics.

There is no grief in this, only the old year
consuming itself, the door knob blazing
in my hand beneath the lightbulb’s electric jewel.
Between voices and fireworks

wind works the bricks to dust—hush, hush—
no language I want to learn. I can touch
the sill worn by hands I’ll never know
in this room with its low table

where I brew chrysanthemum tea. The sign
for Jade Palace sheds green corollas
on the floor. It’s dangerous to stand here
in the chastening glow, darkening

my eyes in the mirror with the gulf of the rest
of my life widening away from me, waiting
for the man I married to pass beneath
the sign of the building, to climb

the five flights and say his Chinese name for me.
He’ll rise up out of the puzzling streets
where men pass bottles of rice liquor, where
the new year is liquor, the black bottle

the whole district is waiting for, like
some benevolent arrest—the moment
when men and women turn to each other and dissolve
each bad bet, every sly mischance,

the dalliance of hands. They turn in lamplight
the way I turn now. Wai Min is in the doorway.
He brings fish. He brings lotus root.
He brings me ghost money.

A teenage runaway and high school dropout, Lynda Hull eventually became a college professor widely acclaimed for her poetry. Newark’s once bustling Chinatown off Mulberry Street was largely a memory by the time she wrote “Chinese New Year,” which appeared in her collection Ghost Money (1986).

Image: NYU Asian-Pacific-American Institute — Image: NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute

taproots

by Hazel Crawley

God of my fathers,
Please accept these lips
You flattened on my face
With your long kiss;
These lips that lose their way
Around your name…
Accept these eyes
Which cannot pierce the veil
Bonded like plywood
For three-hundred years.

I claim you kin
By virtue of the fact
That the Sun’s love
Was burned into my genes
Not to curse Ham,
But to caress a soul
Which can create
Black, tan, beige joy
And fling it in the face
Of Blue-eyed Death

I claim you kin
By virtue of the fact
That I can translate Hell
Into a Spiritual;
Can ‘make a joyful noise’
Before the tree of death;
Before the polls Scylla
And Charybdis guard
With charred perversions
Of their Son-of-God.

I claim you kin
By virtue of the fact
That I shall walk again
Through the White Sea,
A child from your
Black Phallus on each hand,
Another…as a smile
Within my eyes,
Into the fecund womb
Of man’s birth-rights.
There is no death
Can alter me from this.

III

Then…only then,
When all our sons are men
And not the petty
Function of their skins,
I want to lie
Ten-thousand miles removed
And hear my brother
Oozing through the brush
At break of day,
Plucking our lunch,
Which stands upon four legs,
From throbbing life.

Poet and playwright Hazel Crawley was a Newark native. “Taproots” appeared in her collection Erratica in 1975.

newarkpoems

350 years of Newark in verse 1666-2016

Month: February 2016