Travels in Philadelphia/Penn Treaty Park
PENN TREATY PARK
Down by the wharf in old Penn Treaty Park
The trees are all a canopy of green—
The staunch policeboat Stokely, ancient craft,
Is purring with a gentle push of steam
That whispers in her valves. Along the pier
The water clucks and sags. Two river cops
Sit smoking pipes outside their small caboose,
Above them looms a tragic rusty bow,
The Roald Amundsen, Norwegian tanker,
She that caught fire last winter at Point Breeze
While loading oil. The river cops will tell you
How all the Schuylkill was a hell of flame
And ten men lost their lives. The good old Stokley
Dredged the river afterward for bodies.
At sunset time in old Penn Treaty Park
The children sprawl and play: the tawny light
Pours through the leafy chinks in sifted gold
And turns the middle-stream to level fire.
Then, after that red sunset comes the dusk,
The little park is steeped in living shadow,
And Cupid pairs the benches by the pier.
But there's one girl who always sits alone.
Coming at dark, she passes by the shaft
That marks the treaty ground of William Penn.
Too dusk for reading, yet how well she knows
The words carved in the stone: Unbroken Faith.
Mary, of Wildey street, had met Alf Larsen
Up at a picture show on East Girard.
Her father was a hard one: he said fiercely
No girl of his should run around with sailors,
No girl of his should play with bolsheviks.
Alf was Norwegian, and a decent fellow,
A big blond youngster with a quiet eye;
He loved the girl, but old man Morton swore
All Scandinavians were the same as Russians,
And every Russian was a bolshevik.
Mary was stubborn; all her blood was willful;
At twilight, by the old Penn Treaty stone,
She used to wait for Alf, or he for her.
And in some whim of Celtic flame and fancy
The carven words became her heart's own motto,
And there they pledged their love: Unbroken Faith.
Oh, golden evenings there along the river!
When all the tiny park was Eden land—
Oh, eager hearts that burn and leap and shiver,
Oh, hand that mates with hand!
And they would cross the Shackamaxon ferry,
Or walk by Cramps' to see the dry-docked ships
Or in a darkened movie house make merry
With sudden lips on lips—
And half their talk was tremulous with yearning,
And half was of their future, shrewdly planned—
How Alf would leave the sea, and soon be earning
Not less than thirty in a job on land;
Between their kisses they would talk of saving,
Between their calculations, kiss anew,
And she would say that he must be behaving
While she described a little house for two.
With Alf at sea, the girl would still go down
To see the very bench where they had sat,
The tidy Stokley moored beside the pier,
The friendly vista of the Camden shore,
The stone where they had locked their hearts in one.
So time went by. The armistice came on,
And Mary radiant, for her lad no more
Would run the gauntlet of the submarines,
And he had heard a chance to get a job
As watchman up at Cramps'. Just one more voyage
He planned; then he would quit and they'd begin.
So, late one night, in the familiar park
They said good-by. It was their last good-by,
As Mary said: his ship was due to sail
Day after next, and he would have no chance
To come again. She turned beside the stone
To fix in view that place of happy tryst,
The quiet leafless park with powdered frost,
The lamps of the policeboat, red and green.
The Roald Amundsen was Larsen's ship.
She lay at the refinery, Point Breeze,
Taking on oil for Liverpool. The day
She was to sail, somehow she caught on fire.
A petaled rose of hell, she roared in flame—
The burning liquid overflowed her decks,
The dock and oil-scummed river blazing, too.
Her men had little chance. They leaped for life
Into the river, but the paraffin
Blazing along the surface, hemmed them in.
They either burned or drowned, and Alf was one.
The irony of fate has little heed
For tenderness of hearts. The blistered hulk,
Burnt, sunk and raised, with twisted, blackened plates,
A gaunt and gutted horror, seared and charred,
Was towed upstream, and, to be sold for junk,
Was moored beside the Stokley. Where her bow,
All scarred and singed with flame and red with rust,
Must almost overhang the very bench
Of love and happy dreams, the Roald lay.
And Mary, coming down to that old haunt
Where all her bliss and heartbreak were most near,
Found the dead ship, approached, and read the name.
Well, such a tale one cannot tell in full;
Heart's inmost anguish is the heart's alone.
But night by night the girl is sitting there,
Watching the profile of that ship of death,
Watching the Stokey, and the kindly men
Who fought the fire and grappled in the ooze
And did not find the thing she hoped and feared.
And still her only consolation lies
In those two words cut on the trysting stone,
Unbroken Faith. Her faith unbroken still
She sits in shadow near their meeting place:
She will not fail him, should he ever come.
She watches all the children at their play,
And does not fear to dream what might have been,
And half believes, beneath the summer roof,
To see, across the narrow strip of park,
His ruddy face, blond head and quiet eyes.
Yet not until the kindly dusk has come
And fills the little park with blue that heals
Does she go down. She cannot bear to see
The sunset sheet the river o'er with flame.