The panels
there are six fish panels mounted on the Americold wall.
Spiritual Power Courage Use Your Head Kindness Never Try, Never Win Help Mother
Each panel is named for one of the Dogtown Boulders, and features lines from poetry that is locally connected.
Each panel contains illustrations of stories about Gloucester’s past and present (and future?) and also imagery of local fish and vessels and buildings and creatures, imagery of the Greasy Pole, names from the community and contributions from Gloucester’s citizens.
Dogtown boulders
Each of the panels is named for one of the Dogtown boulders:
Never Try, Never Win
Use Your Head
Help Mother
Courage
Kindness
Spiritual Power
T.S. Eliot, 1955.
The Granger Collection, New York
Poetry
Each panel features a piece of poetry, either by a Gloucester poet, or written in or about Gloucester.
Never Try, Never Win has an excerpt from Vincent Ferrini’s An Island Credo.
(see complete poem below).
Use Your Head has an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s THE DRY SALVAGES (No. 3 of 'Four Quartets').
Help Mother has a short excerpt from one of Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems.
People have contributed to the project in other ways, as well — above, Gloucester glass artist Beth Williams contributed leftovers from her bead making for MosaicGloucester to make use of.
A father who lost his child was devastated when a mug his son had given him was broken — we incorporated it into the mosaic’s first panel, below.
Here’s Ferrini’s complete poem, from his book Know Fish.
An Island Credo
the inauguration poem
Gloucester is my Celestial
home
is it yours?
We have a great unrealized Love
for the City, trust it-
voices in the clouds are heard
An ornery fiber girds us
fishy angles, blood music
& cracked binnacles
A round horizon of water
our diadem
mind the undersea Tree
We get out of this untamed rock
what springs
collective singulars
Where to?
Not the ugly conquests
navigations inward
to the Celestial Materials
the selves of the self
where the City is!
There are many Gloucester names incorporated into the body of the mosaic.
Kindness has a poem by Samuel Sawyer (for whom the Sawyer Free Library was named):
In realms of science, literature and art,
Ambition’s herald seeks an honest part;
A place to labor, muse and found a plan,
To raise the scale of life and good to man.
Go to the fields, along our rugged shore,
Pluck the sweet flowers, pebbles by the score,
Gather the seaweed, glist’ning in the sun,
And greet the mermaids, when thy work is done
COURAGE features a poem written by my father, Peter Davison. The poem is called The Great Ledge, from a book of the same name.