In West Concord, behind the railroad tracks and to the side of the bike path, stands a bright yellow phone booth—yes, the kind we were so used to seeing everywhere, and once upon a time used, at least those of us “old” folks did.  When did they disappear?  I have to say I miss them, even the many times I had to search frantically for a dime in order to make a call. They were like mini prayer houses, tiny retreat spaces from the rain, the push of the sidewalk throngs, the wind on an early March morning, a bad break-up.

This yellow structure bears the wondrous words: Poetry Phone.   Anyone can enter the booth, at any time, lift the handle of the receiver and push a button to hear a poem read by the poet. Anyone and Everyone.

This is not the same as listening on a cell phone while you multi-task.  This is a Destination, a poem-length retreat.

A friend of mine joked and said it looked like a Tardis—a Dr. Who reference, for those of you who don’t know, to a time-leaping vehicle bigger on the inside than the outside—and in fact that’s exactly what Poetry is. A time machine, a flying carpet ride, a world opener.  Something larger than an alphabet strung together in blocks on a sheet composed of cellulose fibers.  And to hear it spoken—magic.

Imagine what our world would look like with a phone booth delivering words on every corner.  People would stride down the sidewalk and pause, not to look at a device and distract from the moment, but to enter it more fully, the way one does in the woods—falling into the sound of ideas, other viewpoints, story.  Beauty.

What would it be like to whisk into a booth and hear a short story to chew on, an excerpt from a saga, a sonnet?  Not something familiar, but something pushing us to reach beyond the known, opening doors that presently remain locked or unseen.

The sound of a voice brings us back to our mother’s murmurs, to bedtime tales we wish would never end, to the invitation Story extends to free our spirits no matter our age.

The sound of a voice reading reminds us of the long lineage of storytelling, pulls us back through the centuries to when we gathered around the fire for warmth and connection.

What would the world look like if returned to that state of telling and listening?  Could the power of the spoken word heal our differences of opinion, mend our fractured and polarized world?  Would the beauty and the rhythm open our hearts, bring us to each other, heal us?  What a wonderful and inexpensive first aid kit.

The West Concord Poetry Phone, a project of the West Concord Cultural District Committee, is a community art installation featuring spoken poetry in a solar-powered phone booth, located off the Bruce Freeman Trail, on Beharrell Street in front of the Brookside Square Apartments. The Phone features a menu of nine audio recordings of poems that are refreshed periodically throughout the year. The project installation runs from May 2024 through the end of 2026.  Currently, you can visit Berliner’s poem, I follow the tangle and the tendril.