Of the Carousel

Burt Rashbaum has had the rare privilege of being one of five operators at The Carousel of Happiness, a re-imagining of a 1910 carousel with animals hand-carved by Scott Harrison, a Vietnam veteran who used his decades of carving to heal himself from the horrors of war. With ridership approaching one million, Rashbaum has had the opportunity to see a wide spectrum of life, and how riders react to the beauty of the carousel. In describing his experiences, he would often say, “I see magic there,” but when asked what this magic was, his explanation never seemed to match the actual experience.Rashbaum knew he could only relate his observations in the one genre that can explain the unexplainable, through poetry.With a fiction-writer’s eye and a poet’s sensibility, he crafted these 21 poems as one sequence to reflect the beauty and wonder of The Carousel, the healing that occurs there, the life lessons, the love and indescribable joy that, as one poem states, is “barely contained within the human form.”Some of the poems are in the shape of the carousel, others evoke its movement, the kinetic energy of the place and the enveloping bombast of the 1913 Wurlitzer band organ that plays while the carousel spins. While the words whirl like a rider on the carousel, when they are read aloud they tell stories.Open this book and enter The Carousel of Happiness, become a rider and experience what countless thousands from the world over have shared. Today you don’t even need a ticket. All you need you hold in your hands, the poems Of the Carousel.