Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette This is one of the "EBS" Port Authority buses, as it makes its way through the Liberty Avenue intersection with 6th Street and market Street. Poetry lines the side of the extended buses.

By Elwin Green, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Each weekday morning, thousands of commuters ride to work wrapped in poetry -- not the high pentameter of sonnets, but the syncopated rhythms of quatrains such as:

That big shiny bus
Is really no riddle
But it sure is odd
How it bends in the middle

"It kind of builds on the Burma Shave concept," said Port Authority spokesman Bob Grove, referring to the shaving cream that gained national fame with its roadside poetry from the 1920s until about 1963. "When you start reading them, naturally you want to get to the end of the rhyme."

The poems decorate 25 new additions to the Port Authority's fleet that the transit agency began to place into service in the fall. The new buses are so-called "articulated buses," double-length vehicles that do indeed bend in the middle, and are used on high-traffic routes, such as those on the East Busway.

The poetic exteriors are the latest in the ongoing effort to make buses more visually interesting than the red-and-white affairs that transported commuters a decade ago.

"It was decided that we would try to bring a little more attention to the fleet," in the late 1990s, Mr. Grove said.

The current deployment of rhyme-wrapped buses is hardly the Port Authority's first venture into poetry.

That was more than 30 years ago, when the agency, then named Port Authority Transit of Allegheny County and often referred to as PAT, offered "PAT Rhythms." Beginning on Thanksgiving 1974, the interiors of 200 buses carried placards that were imprinted with one of 20 poems in a program sponsored by the International Poetry Forum. The poems ranged from sensitive to humorous, and even then-Gov. Milton J. Schapp got into the act with:

Never before
have I
metaphor
I didn't like.

"We got a lot of feedback from people who just loved to read them," said Samuel Hazo, president and director of the International Poetry Forum.

Mr. Hazo said the program ran for "two or three years." It would be some 20 years before the Port Authority ventured back into poetic realms with a program appropriately titled "Poetry in Motion." During the summer of 1996, the works of eight African-American female poets ages 12 to 75 were displayed on bus cards in 800 buses.

Then, in 2001, came the Greater Pittsburgh Poem Chase, in which lines of a poem were hidden throughout the city and cards on selected buses offered clues about where to find them.

While the chase was sponsored by Pittsburgh Arts and Letter and an organization called Sun Crumbs in association with Carnegie Library, and earlier poetic forays were sponsored by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the current display of poems has no outside sponsor and required no special funding. It is simply the result of some creative folks at the Port Authority deciding to have some fun. Perhaps for that reason, the poems themselves are more likely to evoke chuckles than contemplation.

Port Authority ridership has risen to a three-year high and while "we'd love to be able to tie our recent increases in ridership" to the poetry, Mr. Grove said, the credit for that goes to stable fares and rising gasoline costs. Still, in the Port Authority's eyes, the poetry has been a success, because it has attracted the public's attention.

For a really good time
Where the fun never ends
Hop on a bus
With a case of the bends