Manhattan Melody

By Patricia Faith Polak

Patricia Faith Polak is an adventurous world traveler whose experiences have led her to appreciate the island she calls home, and now to poetically reflect on the beauty and cultural diversity of Manhattan.

Polaks varied verse not only explores the past as hot cocoa is sipped at Schraffts and a nickels worth of macaroni and cheese is devoured at the Automat, but also reflects on present day as an indigo sky illuminates the city, the sun glows on the tree-shaded paving cobbles outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a park near the East River welcomes nannies, a grassy caf in Greenwich Village lures guests, a chic gallery on the Lower East Side hosts an opening, and as a redhead looks expectantly toward a paper-capped soda jerk in an Edward Hopper painting.

Manhattan Melody shares fifty contemporary reflections from an award-winning poet that share a fresh perspective on the beauty and diversity that surrounds a New York island.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Nov 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781480853881

Patricia Faith Polak

Patricia Faith Polak is an award-winning poet, with a Master of Arts in writing, and a Master in Fine Arts, from Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York. This native New Yorker’s first book of poetry, Manhattan Melodies, shares the beauty and cultural diversity of New York, as a prism shares the colors of sunlight. Patricia’s published works appear in Poet Lore, the Lullwater Review, and elsewhere. Her poem “Absent War, Absent Conflict,” on Picasso’s painting L’enfant au pigeon, was chosen for and read at the peace festival Spring Poetry Rain in Nicosia, Cyprus, in May 2012. A former teacher of gifted third graders, Patricia brings rollicking rhyme to her first children’s book, George G. Whiz: Can I have a pet? – about a child who just cannot get enough pets!

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Copyright © 2017 Patricia Faith Polak.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-5386-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5387-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5388-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017916667

Archway Publishing rev. date: 11/14/2017

CONTENTS

Practicing One’s Craft

Zum Zum

The Classical Age

Write as Rain

Tempo of the City

Mornings at Seven

Nocturne

The Bronze

Vignettes

Allies Day: Childe Hassam

Heavy Metal

The Boulevardier’s Dawn / Cocktail Hour

Pictures at an Exhibition: New York City

Some Irreparable Loss

The Gothamburg Bible

Can You Hear Me, Watson?

The Gypsy Teakettle

Urban Landscape: The Metropolitan Museum

Photomontage: Bleecker Street

Elegy in a City Boneyard

Vincero

The World’s Oldest Writing in the Trade Tower Holocaust

The Aberrant Storm

Carousel in Winter

Toni

Buskers

Bubble, Bubble

To Jumble

If, by Chance

Dolce Far Niente

The Saint’s Day Party

Eight O’Clock

The Grasshopper

Art Is Not a Brassiere

Ne Plus Ultra

Reverie

Barcarole

Urban Homesteading

Blizzard Day: New York

The Big Bang

Our Town

The Brandenburg Concertos: Snowy Manhattan

Twenty-Four-Dollar Real Estate

The City Karooms across My Bedroom Wall

Portrait

Vantage

Nighthawks (1942)

Ferries

Rain Tattoo

Dedication

To: Emil J.

Always Believer

Cliffie

brother taken by leukemia

Inspiring Angel

Donald

once physics major

Haunting brotherly part of me

Acknowledgments

For my parents: Ruth Barbara and Joseph Patrick Leuzzi

You gave a legacy of words, and

fashioned me a debutante

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Ever gratitude for the refined intellect of Sister Dorothy Mercedes of the Sisters of St. Joseph, debating coach at The Mary Louis Academy. Kudos to those dauntless ones, ever tried to teach me to sit a saddle. Exuberant riding in the Moscow Hippodrome, and being part of a Polish wedding on horseback. (Jumping Captain Protein!) A modicum of political science in the classroom at Trinity College, Washington, DC, and on Capitol Hill. Worked in the world of finance. If no fulsome pension from the years with Brahmin John Train, inculcated to write a