Hanging photos and verse liven up the drab expanse of the ferry loading ramp.

Conversations and iPods distract people who amble off the ferries and through the Bainbridge Ferry Terminal passenger walkway – when they’re not looking at their feet.

Apart from partial window views of the water, the scene is utilitarian at best, with bland walls, mottled carpeting and dusty sills, accented with garish orange cones held in line by bright yellow rope.

Those who look toward the beamed ceiling, however, will be surprised to find poetry serenely displayed on soft-colored banners, swaying in the breeze.

“So what’s up with these things?” asked a woman just off a recent early evening ferry. “When did they go up? Nobody can read them, because everybody’s walking.”

The banners are worth the time. Hung on June 26, they are the brainchild of Bainbridge’s Public Art Committee, which sponsored a poetry contest earlier this year titled “Island Portrait.”

“We had done a project for a number of years called Poetry Corner with themes such as ‘family’ and ‘home,’” said Nancy Frey, executive director of the Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council. “This year, the Public Art Committee decided to do a public art project. Under the city ordinance, public art work can be poetry or music or sculpture. The important part is, it gets in front of the public.”

Three judges mulled over nearly 200 poems to choose the 30 winners. Each of the selected poets – ranging from a first-grader to a grandmother – received $125 and a reception at City Hall.

Their poems have been published in a booklet available in local businesses and printed on grocery bags. Soon they will brighten Kitsap Transit buses.

These snapshots of island life – in subjects ranging from trees and wildlife to favorite spots and ferries – are an easy length for quick reading. They’re framed on artfully designed banners with gold-colored titles and authors’ names against a green-and-white background of free-form evergreen trees.

Judges included poet Julie Houston of Copper Canyon Press; Art Hanlon, poetry editor of Art Access magazine; and Mary Lou Sanelli, author of “Craving Water: Poems of Ordinary Life in a Northwest Village.”

Project co-chair Michael Lisagor and other volunteers hung the 24-by-48-inch cloth banners, placing the title of the project and a group photo of most of the selected poets at either end of the passenger walkway. In between, hung back to back, are the poems.

“Some ferry-goers have questioned why we didn’t spread the banners farther apart so they would be even easier to read while walking, but it would have interfered with the digital sign at that end of the walkway,” Lisagor said.

Celia Schorr of Washington State Ferries helped to ensure access to the walkway.

There have been some other public art displays at ferry terminals, Schorr said, adding, “I personally love them.”

With time, so may the public. An informal survey of early morning and evening ferry arrivals revealed the following: more women than men seemed to notice the banners; more women in the 30-plus age bracket stopped to read them; and more women than men pointed them out to fellow travelers.

Women who read some of the poems tended to do so when they were lining up to board a ferry.

“We were going for an overall effect,” Lisagor said. “It was the best way we could come up with to create a positive impression within the existing physical constraints.

“If someone reads one poem a day in each direction, it will enrich them for 15 days. Not a bad deal for free entertainment.”

* * * * *

City Music/Island Music

The sound of cars rolling over tracks, ferries honking, garbage cans smashing – city music has a beat,

I dance by the dock where seagulls cry out –

The ferry is coming, hurry up, back to the island where the music is just the breeze going past your face.

I dance.

– Jake Brigham

Blackbirds

When the sun plays pink

and tangerine notes to the Olympics

blackbirds drink, tossing back shots.

They fly then to the undressed alder,

joining others, which take wing too,

four and twenty north to the bakery.

They’ll sit ’til noon and laugh,

dreaming of pie.

– Barbara Clark

The Rock

Always the rain the wind

the stain of blackberry cobbler

on cotton pants.

Always the sweet new smell of nettles

and always the eyes of backyard

strawberry farms

soft as dirt

of the familiar earth.

– John Davis

To read all of the poetry online, see www.artshum.org/community/pubart/poems.shtml.