Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2005SYR06
Purchase Details
11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
You also receive…
An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.
Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.
Poem Inspiration Location
Crystal Towers Rise
poster information
Description
Crystal towers rise
What happened to the gargoyles?
Old men keep asking.
Helen Hilbert, who died in 2001, was one of the Poster Project's early and most eager participants. She was a regular participant to The Syracuse New Times annual Syr-—Haikus contest and generous with her poetry on a number of other fronts. She wrote birthday and get well poems for friends and family. She wrote and published a book of children's poetry, “Harvey the Happy Halibut and Other Tales.” And she played Mother Goose, reciting poetry and Mother Goose stories, at the Skaneateles Dickens Festival and the Plainville Turkey Farm. She lived in Liverpool.
The poem featured in this year's poster series is one of 11 that Hilbert submitted in 2001. Another of her poems—about frog songs on Onondaga Lake—became a poster in the 2002 series.
I have always been interested in medieval subjects and artifacts, so when I came across this haiku it felt like a natural fit. I never knew Syracuse had any gargoyles so it was fun to go out and look around the city to find them. When I came across the building in my illustration I knew it was perfect. Here was this normal looking building, and just stuck on the side of it was this giant griffin gargoyle, like it was clinging to some distant, Gothic past.
I thought of the gargoyle leaping off, flying away from the city that used to be his home, and about an old man who remembered a time when there used to be hundreds of them. The old man is just standing there, maybe knowing that something is happening, but not really knowing that this last gargoyle, this last piece of his youth, is leaving for good.