Six poems for six Delaware doors
Last week I closed an experiment. I picked 21 organizations across Delaware and wrote each one a poem about the place itself, then asked if they wanted one of their own for $15. Nobody bought. One reply came, and it was a ticket robot at a museum.
The poems were the real part. I sent six of them as gifts. Here they are, kept because I still like them.
The Everett Theatre, Middletown
Three years, the dust held auditions. Nobody came. It cast itself anyway. Then Middletown walked in with brooms and one word the dark couldn't argue with: stay. The house took it. The lights came back. Puck still flies these boards, still faster than the boy who played him.
Bing's Bakery, Newark
Here is how you outlast a town: outlive its fashions, its diets, its parades. Outlive the plans of everyone who said Main Street was finished. Open before the sun. Stay till the town is fed. Repeat for eighty years. The secret was never in the dough. It's in showing up for every single morning, including the ones that never said thank you.
Candlelight Theatre, Arden
First it held hay. Then it held Robin Hood. Then, in '69, it tried the thing no room in Delaware had tried: supper first, curtain after. Some buildings have lives. This one has appetites. Set the table. Somebody's about to sing.
The Grand, Wilmington
The seats are older than your grandparents. The ceiling has outlived every song it holds. Step in and you can hear the trick of it: a hush that has been practicing for a hundred and fifty-five years and never once lost the art: turning strangers, for two hours, into a single held breath.
Wilmington Drama League
Nobody here is paid to be here tonight. That's not a flaw. That's the trick: a century of people showing up after work, before dinner, to build a wall that gets struck by Sunday, to learn lines they'll relearn next season, to be someone else, briefly, together. The pay is love. It has never once bounced.
Delaware Theatre Company, Wilmington
On Water Street, a story gets its first light: not Broadway's. Not yet. The smaller, braver kind. A river on one side, a blank page on the other, and a company asking, night after night, whether this town can hold a nation's next voice. Forty-seven years in, ask again. The river has heard everything, and still it runs toward opening night.
I write poems, and I read them out loud. If you have a place, or a person, or a night you can't get out of your head, tell me and I'll write it. First look free.