Thoughts Composed After Filming a Sunrise on the Walt Whitman Bridge

For John Hart, CBS Morning News

A Hundred Years have passed, gay Camden Camerado,
You were the World's before you were ours
Your charity has begun abroad, ethnic rancor festers by the Delaware,
From Gorki's lower depths, your promiscuous sun rose in a Soviet East
"O take my hand, Walt Whitman!
Such gliding wonders! Such sighs and sounds!"
And in a scummy Dublin slum
Sean O'Casey (nee John Casey) warmed numbed fingers
at your universal fire
"Leaves of Grass: a book in which the whole world danced,
even on its way to the grave..."
Ten thousand miles South of Camden
The giant of Macchu Pichu
tuned in your airy frequencies
at fifteen, over half a century ago.

That's the good news, this century of waiting and waste:
Now the bad, Old Buddy:
Your hotel burnt out some years back
It had closed anyway, rundown, derelict
bypassed by Holiday Inns and the Anywhere Hilton
The "Poet's Corner" coffee shop teemed with garbage
When I was looking for a pious breakfast this morning
They even hassled naming the bridge after you
"Notorious homosexual" that you were
Setting machismo kids a bad example
(It pleases me that it replaced the Camden ferry)

Ignoring you, the jolly cop who let me film
Drove me to your Broad Street statue
Smearing that sunrise with blackest hatred.

October 23, 1972