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RETURNING TO DREAMLAND

This video was created and posted on YouTube by BooUrns28. It’s a tour of Coney Island and includes some of his thoughts and memories delivered in sterling Brooklynese.  If you are viewing this post from an email subscription, you’ll have to link to The Poet by Day to see it.

The lagoon and tower at Dreamland Park, Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, 1907.
The lagoon and tower at Dreamland Park, Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, 1907.

One belongs to Coney Island instantly . . . “

I’m playing with writing a poem about the Coney Island of my childhood and youth. I know “the good old days” weren’t what they’re cracked up to be and nostalgia is an unhealthy indulgence. Occasionally, however, it provides momentary relief from the questions and tensions of the present.

The materialistic 50s and rebellious 60s: Lugging bags with bathing suits, the requisite portable radio, beach blanket and towels, hopping on the BMT, enduring summer’s outrageous heat and humidity, and heading for Stillwell Avenue and Coney Island, a place of delicously unhealthy food and all that is weird but engaging.

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The raucous Coney Island rides were never to my taste, but some of the strange shows, the boardwalk, the people-watching, the beach, riding the waves, the carnival games, Nathan’s Famous hot dogs and french fries, and holding out for Surf Avenue and Shatzkin’s potato knishes . . . . . . these were fascinations. 

The old Coney Island was once so much a part of American iconography and honky-tonk subculture that it’s probably on your radar even if you’ve never been there. It’s the stuff of artists rendering in everything creative: photography, movies, music, fine arts, books, and poems. Link here to a short film, In Memoriam, Coney Island 1952, which was an International Venice Film Festival prizewinner. The narrator is Henry Morgan. This movie catches the flavor of the place as I and my contemporaries knew it with its incredible crowds and all that is odd, funny, vulgar, dubious, kitschy …  and yet, somehow perfectly wonderful.

© 2016, words, Jamie Dedes; photo credits ~ Dreamland Tower, public domain photograph courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress, Nathan’s Famous photograph courtesy of Willyumdelirious under CC BY 2.0 license.

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FOR MRS. WHITMAN, a poem … and your Wednesday Writing Prompt

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you left one winter day to balancé on sunbeams
and pirouette on the moon, artfully swirling
lunar dust and scattering it over our dreams,
sparking our lives with memory and a love of
dance, a legacy of delight for tiny ballerinas ~
see us now, as well-worn as your old toe shoes

© 2012, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; Photo credit ~ pointe shoes by Lambtron via Wikipedia under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

WRITING PROMPT

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.” Charles Bukowski

Growing old, the only way to escape it is to die young and most of us wouldn’t opt for that given a choice.  Write a poem that juxtaposes and fond youthful memory with your current place in life.  See if you can do it in brief. Brevity often lends itself well to clarity and deeper emotion.

I encourage you to share your poem with me and with other readers.  Click on the Mister Linky icon below and enter you name and the link to your piece so that we may all read and enjoy. (Please DON’T enter the link to your blog. DO enter the link to the relevant post.) I’ll check back on this week’s Mister Linky for two weeks. You don’t need to link in something today if you’re not ready.

To read Renee Espiru’s poem in response to a Wednesday Writing Prompt link HERE.