Editor’s note: Did you know April is national poetry month? We’re running an Everett-centric poetry contest. Submit to win a $50 gift card to Major League Pizza and two tickets to Fisherman’s Village Music Festival. Learn more here.

Photo Credit: Everett Public Library's photo archives.

Milltown

I see you as you were
Your victory gardens grown over underfoot
The specters that walk the mudflats
O three-fingered shingle weavers
O daughters of founding fathers
At windows overlooking rhododendrons & slate grey seas

City
Your civic pride from days of yore
Stump speeches & grandstanding from the gazebo in Clark Park
Parades
City razed of timber & of timber built
Bungalows for the worker
And smokestacks that billow black skyward

Milltown
I see you as you are
City of moss & lichen, dripping eaves
Your peninsula a tooth biting northward
Into estuary and birdland of capsized boat
The sea that foams

Rocks & rosehips
The crooked sloping alley with overturned rusting chassis
Your brick clubs for Nordic pensioners
Your dive bars
Your reliquaries of antiques
Your tiendas & laundromats
A terminus for railroads

O one-armed veterans home from which war
O civil servants & tattoo artists
O provincial magistrates

City—I am mad to walk your cracked sidewalks
Seaward

Milltown
Seaside metropolis
I see you as you are to be
Though spurned by the changing whims of industry
You will rise again
Buoyed & bolstered by the songs of poets in your streets
And youth
A song of thrift & pluck & vigor
A song of women & men applying themselves to the labors of the day
The reviving of trades

Enough of the back bent to stoop
We will stand to see our fruit
 

Richard Porter is a writer for Live in Everett.