The clock on the Congo steeple has a blank face, the bell is mute
that sounded in the night — bong-bong-bong — to assure the wakeful
the world was still going on. How can we know who and where we are? Years
into another war, it's an uneasy time, a tense, suspicious time.
Change keeps pouring over us as it has since Solomon, incessantly
as the waves scrubbing the shore. Each generation mourns its losses —
sandwiches and coffee at Poole's Drugstore, the elm at Five Corners that
struggled to live and died. But the next generation forgets.
We don't remember the elm on Dock Square — its grace and amplitude,
its plenteous shade. We don't remember the schooner Hattie Paige
wrecked by Knowlton's Wharf, the submarine run aground in the harbor, the
time the train jumped the tracks to cross Railroad Ave. Nobody hurt.
Gone are the days when cows grazed on Pigeon Hill, chickens roamed free on
Bearskin Neck, willows lined Back Beach. Gone are the days when Den-Mar
was the Poor Farm, the bakery horse and wagon
delivered warm anadama bread in time for breakfast. No more trolley,
no more whiteclad sailors swarming off the battleships offshore.
Harvey Tarr's livery stable? Gone. No more fishing boats hauled up for the
winter on Baptist Common, no more Patch's Corner Gang,
no Reuben Norwood's ice house, horses on the Mill Pond cutting ice.
Boys, girls too, lugged pails of water, dinner buckets to the quarrymen.
Sometimes they got to pull the cord on the steam whistle to blare
"mug-up!" Men in derby hats blasted with gunpowder. Oxen hauled granite
wagons, the harbor might hold a scow, a stone sloop, a four-masted
schooner
bound for Havana. Derricks rose "like the masts of ships run aground."
Loaded stone cars hurtled down the hills. The granite bridge rose
triumphant
at Flat Ledge Quarry, but the breakwater — the funds to finish never came.
Every clapboard in town was nailed by somebody, every floor laid.
Men downed trees with two-man crosscut saws, wielded maul and wedge, fit
pegs into timbers, raised sledgehammers to granite till nightfall. Women
birthed, swept, boiled, readied the dead for burial, toiled
with needles in the dimlit evenings. What they made is ours now.
It's in our hands. What will they think of us, forty, eighty years on?
That we nurtured the young, took care of the old. Took care of the old,
imagined the new. That we loved our town, loved it so much
we found the boldness to plant an elm tree, to lay a cornerstone.
RUTH MAASSEN
Poet laureate of Rockport
