Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you
are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home,
are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me,
and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
It all begins with Whitman. Well, sort of.
When we gathered around the Gandhi statue one April afternoon and offered the passengers of the Q train, poetry, we were met with some resistance. Then, the miraculous transformation followed, after Samantha offered her sweet reminisces of blackberries from the local grocery store in her island borne tongue, Adam danced as if all his cool depended on everything and Jon invited us to cleanest joint in all of Brooklyn, they were hooked.
Me, I’m behind the camera, a paparraza, studying the teenie tiniest of gestures that linger between curiousity and love from a captive Saturday Afternoon audience. Yeah. There was no Manhattan Bridge in Whitman’s world. That everyman of poetry. That mad man wandered about the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn spitting verse to whomever would listening. And loved ferryboats. We do too. We are his legacy and then some. We are Brooklyn poets. We are Whitman’s children. And with every moment we cross the ferry, we reflect those multitudes.
Welcome to our journey.
–Syreeta McFadden