On Nicollet Mall, fine rhymes for all

Nicollet Mall is one of the few successful pedestrian malls in a major American city; most were jackhammered up years ago. Our serpentine street remains a local treasure, but periodically it needs improvements, and this summer it's getting new concrete and gardens on three blocks. To commemorate the construction, the Minneapolis Downtown Improvement District launched an initiative befitting of this literate city: a poetry contest. The winning pro-mall poesy will be installed on signs. People will stop, read, reflect and continue on, ennobled. Perhaps even empowered.

Permit us to use this space for some entries, heralding some attributes that might otherwise go unsung. For example, the mall needs a poem for jaywalkers.

I think that I shall never see / the light-rail train that flattens me/ I cross the tracks without a glance / Around the axle, wrapped: my pants.

Perhaps some situation-specific haiku:

Mary Tyler Moore

Threw her hat. In the background:

Old lady scowled.

There once was a big store called Dayton's.

Add up all we bought, it would weigh tons.

Our proud hometown store!

Now the name is no more

Whose fault? My grandma says Satan's

Higgedly Piggledy,

Hubert H. Humphrey,

Walked on this street as his

Future he planned.

"Gubernatorial

Washington beckons: a

Senator man!

You have to know what a double-dactyl is to appreciate that, and if you do, you know what a poor example it is. Ah well. Doesn't matter: Not one of these would be acceptable. The poems have to concern the future, and the poems must have one or more of the following words: "change, vision, vibrant, community, gather, or commerce." Oh. No. Please. These earnest words are poetry killers. Let's just try to imagine the ultimate poem, which would have them all:

Together, a vision of change / we gather as a community / vibrant commerce is all around / this bus shelter really smells like someone went in it.

See? The presence of the words alone doesn't guarantee anything but empty civic platitudes. Or they could be used subversively:

Where people would throng with a full purse.

Vibrant places of glee

Were replaced by, say, Block E:

As much fun as a ride in a black hearse.

There's something to be said for creaky old civic poetry, with rhyme and meter. I still remember the rousing song they taught us at the U:

No one wore hats to take off to indicate our firm trueness to Ski-U-Mah, whatever that was, but you loved to sing it, and it was easy to remember because it rhymed. Everyone would know his city's poem if it rhymed:

O Eagan, my Eagan / from thine hills beauty flowed / O Eagan, my Eagan / Just take Pilot Knob Road.

Kids would sing it with their hands over their hearts.

The Nicollet Poetry initiative is a good idea, but please: Drop the requirements. And I say that with all the vibrant vision of gathering change I can muster.