Local poet’s work to be engraved in Penn Square path , by Bernard Harris, Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era
Looking at the dying light of a winter’s day in a painting by David Brumbach, the viewer feels the need to step around the puddles and snow. Brumbach’s street scenes of Lancaster are so familiar that people feel a part of them. It was that imagery that Barbara Buckman Strasko captures in her poem “Bricks and Mortar.” (Click here to read full article.)
Bricks and Mortar
for David Brumbach (Lancaster County Painter 1948- 1992)
We’ll be waiting for you in the shadow
of the trees at the corner of King and Lime,
the sun behind us, lighting our way.
We’ll see you when the snow falls
on St. James, where the great elms
once grew leaning into the cemetery.
You could be waiting by the Conestoga,
looking past its bends and turns to
the slivered moon in a dark valley.
One evening we might see a light in the
fanned window of Demuth’s birthplace and
you painting in the apartment next door.
We’ll wait in the square near the market
eating bread and bright vegetables,
knowing you will come by with flowers.
And if there were a hole through you
and a hole through me, it would surely
be the city that threads us together
in a psalm of silk, each brick a golden stitch.
