Installation by Bryan Wilson For National Poetry Month 2024, Civic Poet Shin Yu Pai is launching Poetry in Place. This public poetry project includes the work of five local artists on the theme of Seattle places and sustainability at sites all across the city.
Atmospheric River By Bryan Wilson (In a city where rivers float in the sky) braiding through cedars & buildings like a sentence in a poem, rivers rise as raindrops. A city, Heron-still — staring into Sound stones polishing words — storm-galoshing songs. Before long, river-rain makes watercolors of us, gathers in its clay-blue turbidity: vanishing sunbreaks & glaciers, the neighborhood breakfast spot, beaver’s lodge packed with wildflowers, stinging green of spring nettles, eddies of garlic in a small kitchen full of laughter, tumbling sediment of dreams — fictions and fishes. Sometimes, I’m a stone, mossy, sometimes awash in whorling passage. Sometimes, on a ferry full of passengers, we greet the water that connects us in torrents of riverine imagination.
Visit the Bureau of Fearless Ideas in Greenwood and the Seattle Municipal Tower in Downtown to see Wilson’s poem. You can also download the postcard and poster versions for yourself on our website.
Bryan Wilson is a writer, illustrator, and educator. He is program manager at the Bureau of Fearless Ideas, where he leads writing and publishing projects with young authors.
Learn more about Civic Poet Shin Yu Pai’s public poetry campaign.
Designed by Jayme Yen. This public poetry program is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Mellon Foundation. This project was also supported by The Windrose Fund.
