When I get calls and emails requesting information about Lynbrook’s history, I sometimes learn more than what I provide. This happened the other day when I received a request from a TV documentary producer from Los Angeles. She wanted information about Lynbrook in the 1930s. Her subject is Edward Field, 101 (b. June 7, 1924). He is an award-winning poet who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Lynbrook. Field graduated from Lynbrook High School in 1941. Not only is he a fine poet, he is a WW2 hero who was rescued from a lifeboat after his bomber was shot down over the North Sea.
Edward Field wrote a dozen books of poetry, but I had never heard of him. I was excited to learn more. It turns out his years in Lynbrook were not happy ones partly because he experienced his hometown’s share of the antisemitism that was so pervasive in the 1930s. Despite these unhappy memories, Field’s best-known work, “Stand Up, Friend, with Me,” (Grove Pres, New York, 1963) includes two wonderful poems that refer to Lynbrook. The following one, “Prologue,” identifies our village not by name but by place in the universe, and on our fish-shaped island. I’d like to nominate Lynbrook's “Official Poem” and Edward Field our “Official Poet.”
Look, friend, at this universe
With its spiral clusters of stars
Flying out all over space
Like bedsprings suddenly busting free;
And in this galaxy, the sun
Fissioning itself away,
Surrounded by planets, prominent in their dignity,
And bits and pieces running wild;
And this middling planet
With a lone moon circling round it.
Look, friend, through the fog of gases at this world
With its skin of earth and rock, water and ice,
With various creatures and rooted things;
And up from the bulging waistline
To this land of concrete towers,
Its roads swarming like a hive cut open,
Offshore to this island, long and fishshaped,
Its mouth to a metropolis,
And in its belly, this village,
A gathering of families at a crossways,
And in this house, upstairs and through the wide open door
Of the front bedroom with a window on the world,
Look, friend, at me.
