I captured the sidewalk poem below on Friday evening last, on our walk to a local restaurant. Carbone’s (if you must know), since Scusi is chiuso. This poem appears on Macalester between Jefferson and Juliet.

For those wanting a refresher, the Everyday Poems for City Sidewalks is an initiative of the City Artist, Marcus Young, under the auspices of Public Art St. Paul. PASP dates back to 1987 and the sidewalk poetry project to 2007. The program piggybacks on the essential city service of keeping the sidewalks in repair. The poems, 47 of them to date, were written by St. Paul residents. They are selected in contests that run for a month each fall. (I have my submissions ready for this year, how about you?) Over 700 sidewalk squares have been graced so far with one of the poems.

The image below represents an experiment in making the poems legible from my iPhone photos, which aren’t always captured under the best of conditions.

This poem is not my favorite of the oeuvre: it is pretty downbeat, whereas normally I prefer poetry that uplifts. I think we can agree that the marriage of the couple depicted here is off to a rocky start.

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