This past Tuesday, a notably tall, distinguished-looking grey-haired gentleman in his early 70s was standing on Red Hook’s Valentino Pier, a typewritten sheet of paper in his hand. He was dressed formally, in a dark suit and tie, in contrast to the dozen or so uniformed park rangers and young city government aides on the pier around him. The pier was decorated for the occasion with green and white New York City Parks Department flags.
What was the occasion? The unveiling of a poem, newly inscribed line by line along the bottom of the pier’s south-side steel fencing: “I Was Never Able to Pray,” by Edward Hirsch, who proceeded to read his work aloud to the Parks staffers and those few of us civilians who had fortuitously come upon this unexpected waterfront ceremony.
It’s a lovely and moving verse, well suited to be engraved on a Brooklyn pier.
–Bill Orme
[Scroll through the photos below to read the poem]
