Wellington Cramer
Staten Island Ferry-Boat
Most of my dreams, and I have had millions, seem best to present themselves on the Staten Island Ferry-boat as it ploughed its way from 69th Street in Brooklyn to St. George on Staten Island. My mother was a dreamer—mostly removing herself from reality. My dreams took me all over the world, all over the United States. They took me there in balloons, on trains, and on camel back. I was very much taken with Richard Halliburton and his Royal Road to Romance. He rode a bicycle around the pyramids, he pranced through the Taj Mahal, and he swam the Hellespont. I was a great lover of Lawrence of Arabia. Funny how I have always had such an affinity for the Germans and the Arabs. Have you ever smelled the water in the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island? Have you ever smelled hemp from a tramp steamer lying at its dock? Have you ever smelled a coffee roaster riding on the Sea Beach Express over the Manhattan Bridge? Can you possibly imagine the aroma in Bridgeton, N.J. at the Ritter plant in Catsup-making time? Can you feel the aroma of tar and coal oil as it is freshly laid on a dusty road? I can even smell snow and rain.*
With my first poem written in 1974, I became aware of poetry as a new and important part of my life. I built a small library choosing its books by finding the poetry section of a bookstore and seated on the floor taking down titles that caught my attention. Randomly turning to different pages of each one, if I could find five poems that I liked, I bought the book. The day I found Beyond Words: Writing Poems with Children by Elizabeth McKim and Judith W. Steinbergh, I was drawn to every page of student and author poems. The author's words below were my first view of what poetry could be.
Elizabeth McKim and Judith W. Steinbergh write, “Poetry is a special way of perceiving the world. It is a weaving together of feelings and environment. Poets not only see things in great detail, but also see them on other levels.... In order to write poetry, one must be vulnerable, sensitive to sounds and rhythms both in language and in the surrounding environment.”*
My dad's poem, "Staten Island Ferry-Boat" was written sometime during the 1970s. Reading it, I knew my dad as a new treasure, as a writer—his world right then become mine in this special way.
My realization is, "We remember poetry because it takes us by thought, by feelings, and also by sensory detail into a new world—the one that the poet is offering."
* Wellington Cramer, "Staten Island Ferry-Boat" in A Flower for God: A Memoir (Seattle, WA: Wilson Duke Press, 2021), 120.
* Elizabeth McKim and Judith Steinberg, Beyond Words: Writing Poems with Children (Green Harbor, Wampeter Press, 1983), 7. MA: