Roosevelt Island
by Alex Cigale
[ poetry - april 09 ]
With smallpox, the palsied, paralytic,
the utterly mad, penniless, vagrant,
sexually depraved, criminal, fiendish,
the great city sent this beautiful island.
Manhattan Island was a sinking ship,
a sliver of land in the East River;
sobs of the imprisoned and nearly dead,
monologues of the overlooked, forgotten.
Asylum, jail, poorhouse gone without a trace.
An exorcism has recast this island.
Welfare Island, Gotham's Utopia,
an experiment in urban living.
Glass city; interiors without walls.
And the rest, as they say, was history.
