Seventy-Five Jackson Street

Seventy-Five Jackson Street

By Stone Riley

-Stone Riley’s Website-

Art by Mac Mcgill
saatchiart.com/macmcgill

Seventy-Five Jackson Street

An illustrated poem by Stone Riley
April 2011 ©

Seventy-Five Jackson Street in Worcester
Massachusetts is an old empty red brick factory
like countless thousands of others in New England
in our time. But more particular, it’s one of
several city blocks of them that I drive among while
delivering a child – my lovely young
granddaughter – to her school most mornings. All
these abandoned red brick mills, each one of them
in city blocks or standing in the countryside, small
or large, so imperious with their profound
squareness – so many myriad of red flat bricks all
in Pythagorean vertical flat planes – and so
astonishing with their transcendental emptiness –
habitation now for long gone souls now passed to
elsewhere who in other time labor here daily, living
lives like mine inside that place – while I pass by
or sometimes stop to stare they fill me with
strange emotions. These are such human things.
They are so still and old and yet – as life forever
must be hope – I see each one to be an ancient womb.

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