Sylvia Baumgartel - Gramercy Park

[highlyeccentric]

The windows around Gramercy have eyes.
We look, they look back.
A brook cut through the swamp.
The Dutch called it Krom Mesje, little crooked knife.
A little body of water is a dagger, a bigger body is a kill.
The Dutch came for beavers and named us all to pieces.

Baghdad is a swamp of killing.
Gramercy is a kill two acres big.
Bombs lit the desert sky like flowers.
The Super Hornet pilot says, It’s lovely,
The only part of the Iraqi girl you can see is her eyes.
It was a perfect home.

The Turks stormed Baghdad and
Decimated the Byzantines.
The winners had better arrows.
Balls of ice fell on the losers.
Inside each ball was a flower.
The flowers in the ice balls looked like eyes.

When you live on Gramercy Park,
You get two keys.
The doorman keeps them both.