Baked Pears in Duane Park

This poem was inspired by The Met Museum’s description accompanying William P. Chappel’s Baked Pears in Duane Park.

Writing in the 1880s, one New Yorker fondly reminisced about the black women who stood in the streets tempting passersby with a baked pear “carried around in a deep-glazed earthenware dish, floating deliciously in a warm bath of home-made syrup.” Despite the writer’s nostalgia, the baked pear sellers suffered the same lot as the rest of the city’s hucksters—a group largely comprised of impoverished blacks and white women and children who struggled to survive in the lowest rungs of society. The location depicted is Duane Street Park, at the intersection of Duane and Hudson, just north of the fashionable third ward. – The Met

I chose to explore the nonce form, creating my own form for this one-time use: stanzas of six lines, lines 1-4 and 6 end with a half-rhyme, line 5 no rule. More of my ekphrastic poetry here.

From the other side of the world
I click on google maps to find
the street corner where you struggled
to survive, selling your home-made
baked pears in warm syrup from
an earthenware dish you carried on your head.

To my non-New York eyes –
the corner is not the same. Loft buildings
now line Duane and Hudson. Restaurants.
Sycamores supplanted your forest trees in the ‘40s.
Wells and Fargo, long gone.
Iron fencing replaced your white pickets.

There’s a path through the park
now. The camera allows a google-walk.
The park’s smaller. People on benches eat, drink
coffee. A flagpole. An abandoned New York
Yankees cap. Beds of tulips and daffodils.
Surrounded by the wealth of Tribeca.

Five dollars the city bought the park for
from Trinity Church, eighty years before
you began walking there. On Broadway, prayer
at Trinity Church, and outside, a hawker
and an artist, sell hats and paintings,
but nothing as lovely as a warm, syrupy pear.

You ghost-walk with me. Syrup spills
from the dish on your head, your incredulity swells
at the skyscrapers, the cars, the noise, the regal
red-bricked buildings, fire escapes. Cobble-
stones underfoot make you smile in recognition.
Not a single horse, you note. So many people.

Breathless at the engineering, the bustle of the living,
after a few minutes gaping at the sparkling
modernity, I see you’re tired. We take a faltering
google walk back to Duane Park. You’re heartbreaking,
as I leave you by the daffodils, recognise your struggle,
and thank you for a journey neither of us was expecting.

Hello!

Baked Pears in Duane Park – A Poem