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Write Your Block: Kingsessing Avenue

Mapping Philadelphia, one poem at a time

Write Your Block: Kingsessing Avenue

Mapping Philadelphia, one poem at a time

Frank Sherlock, former Philadelphia Poet Laureate, created Write Your Block as a way for Philadelphians to explore their neighborhoods via poetry, charting—and sharing—their communities through their own words. The result: A map of Philadelphia that is not rivers and parks and streets, but ideas and memories and dreams for neighborhoods through the people who know them best. Below, one such poem, from one Philadelphian.

Submit your own neighborhood poem here.

Kingsessing Avenue
by Ernest Hilbert
The men sift the ash of an incinerated Victorian

For the clink of coin or cufflink,

Some remnant in the wreckage

One might don or exchange once more.

Embers of dandelion

Are dimmed as the slow breeze spreads

Soot along the block, to porches, sills,

Soft gray clovers of cats’ paws.

Header Photo: Flickr/Blake Bolinger


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