erin.

blue light special. 6 September 2010

Anyone who was lived in Baltimore or visited some of its off-the-beaten-path spots knows its ubiquitous blue lights: the blinking surveillance cameras posted on corners in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods.  Civic Works, the organization that oversees Real Food Farm where I worked this summer, also has a community lots team that transforms vacant lots into community gardens.  This poem was written as a meditation on their work and the power of transformation on the urban landscape.  I couldn’t find the full name of the author, but I wanted to share this.  I think it’s simply beautiful.

We Garden Under Blue Lights

We garden under blue lights
Affixed to a 30ft pole
The blue lights flash
Specially marking
Our inner city acres

To get the lights
a street needs to have
enough gun shots
enough drug deals
enough walking dead
(hungry ghosts)

At these blue light places
we garden
first collecting pieces
of blue light toxic waste
needles, chicken boxes, mattresses
rat carcasses, colt 45 cans, sofas,
toilets, crack viles, bullet casings,
dirty diapers, broken toys
carting them all away
in contractor bags and dump trucks
replacing now vacant space
with organic matter
hummus soil
layering in life giving compost
making a base for something new
with paths, trails, labyrinths
we mark a wandering course

Its slow going
under the blue lights
they’re presided over so much death
but the resurrection
is buds of brilliant blue
stems and stalks decorated with rainbow
petals
sunflowers towering their faces of a
thousand seeds
follow the sun
rocks smooth steps in an imaginary river
bed
boulders jutting from deep dug holes
secure in their new home
bushes creeping around trees
slowly growing to canopy beauty

After long hours
sweaty heavy dirty work
people sisters and brothers
young and old
gaze…
at our blue light special
still remembering what was
charmed by what is.

–PKB, June 2008