Words + Images

Boston Public Garden Street Light

When I first read Lin Nulman’s haiku, I told her that her words made me want to paint, to capture the vivid impressions she conveyed of Boston.  I have yet to pick up a brush but I did think of her words when I rediscovered this photograph.  Her work appears in this week’s issue of Spare Change News, the longest continuously running street paper in the U.S.  Over 100 vendors, many of whom are currently or formerly homeless, purchase the papers from a distribution office for .25 and sell them on the streets of Boston, Cambridge and Somerville for $1.00.  If you’re in the neighborhood consider purchasing a copy, or making an online donation.  The writing is excellent and the stories not often told.  Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy Lin’s words below.

Sights of the City Haiku

Boston winter night—

streetlight caught in the glass rim

of a sun-catcher.

Dark birds float to a

bare tree. Underneath pages

of newspaper blow.

A young man reads poems

by Lorca on the train, lips

moving, body still.

Sky of milk and slate—

the sails below are whiter,

the river bluer.

Vs of geese fly east

across a violet sky, haze

above the wet earth.

My pages ruffle,

and the willow grows pale leaves.

They also ruffle.

T-shirt heat. Black-haired

boy’s block-print tattoo fills his

forearm: FORGIVEN.

Early autumn day.

Bronze beads pepper a bench from

a broken earring.

Blue sidewalk. Lights of

table candles tremble their

small constellation.

Lin A. Nulman is an Adjunct Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College.  Her poetry has appeared in Black Water Review, Tanka Splendor, and the anthology Regrets Only: Contemporary Poets on the Theme of Regret, among others.