Thursday, September 4, 2014

* The Streets of New Haven (1944 -2012)


 

 (A reflection for Mr. Daponte-Smith)


NEW HAVEN STREETS
 

(1944 - 2014)
 

For seven decades New Haven's streets



have been my
 
 
cradle.


Dickens and Twain called
 
 

Hillhouse


 
 

“the most beautiful street in America.”


 

These were the streets
 
of Presidents: Bill (and Hillary),
Bushes, and the rotund Taft.
 
 
 
 
 
The streets of Buckley’s God and Man at Yale
 
 
 
 
The streets of Black Panthers and Sloane Coffin.


The same streets on
 
 

which John Hinckley

 
 
 
stalked Jodi Foster,
 
 
 
hatching a demented plan
 
 
 
for a President.

 

Streets where the Streeps and Winklers
 
 
 
walked to drama class; hoping to hear
 
 
 
the Shubert ghosts,
 
 
 
Thornton and Tallulah,
 
 
 
rehearsing "The Skin of Our Teeth."


 

In my great-grandmother's day,
 


these streets were horse-filled
 


pathways from which the stench


 
of dying slaves trapped aboard
 
 

a harbored Amistad

 
 
wafted toward Yale nostrils.


Now they are asphalt:

 
 

Streets where campus
police



merely kick a black man on graduation night.*

 

Ah, New Haven: my birthplace,
 
my curseplace.

_______________________________

Paul Keane


M. Div. ‘80

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