THE CITY

 

She, with her wounds and emptying veins, may dream

Of creeping death, yet laughs through pain and ruth.

Her thinning blood made richer by that stream

Of gladly-given plasma known as Youth.

THE GEESE GO NORTH

 

High in the blue the wild geese arrow on

And break the crystal silence with their call

That spells unrest and old remembered springs.

Dark in the dusk and silver in the dawn

The far wedge floats, the pinions rise and fall

As azure space is scythed by eager wings.

And I who hear those bugling throats above

These hills that are no longer home to me

Must follow after them, must now go forth

And seek the lake-lands that I know and love,

The pine-dark ridge, the rivers running free,

The blue-domed silence of the brooding North.

THE ELMS AT THE PLAZA

 

(Rockefeller Center)

 

Brought helpless from some outland home,

And barred as in a cage,

Through steel-grilled beds of gardener’s loam

They now seek anchorage.

 

The winds of spring blow never sweet

Between their straitened boles;

The only stream that laves their feet

Are spates of restless souls.

 

The sound that through their leafage steals

Is never a white-throat’s song;

They only hear man’s heartless wheels

Where haste and madness throng.

 

But still past sterile iron and stone

They grope to Mother Earth

And seek the breast they must have known

And reached for at their birth.

 

And I, who knew a world afar

Where life more richly ran,

Here seem to lose some happier star

For a city made of man.

CHRISTMAS-TREES IN WEST STREET

 

(Dark and true and tender is the North.—Caedman)

 

I pass where the pines for Christmas

Stand thick in the crowded street,

Where the groves of Dream and Silence

Are paced by feverish feet.

 

And far through the rain and the street-cries

My homesick heart goes forth

To the pine-clad hills of childhood,

To the dark and tender North.

 

And I see the blue-green pinelands

And I thrill to the northland cold

Where the sunset falls in silence

On the hills of gloom and gold.

 

And the still dusk woods close round me,

And I know the waiting eyes

Of the North, like a child’s, are tender,

As a sorrowing mother’s, wise.

THE POET IN BATTERY PARK

 

We walk Time’s crowded shore and day by day

Weave idle dreams and with still childish hands

Enscroll our foolish markings on the sands,

And tide by tide our work seems washed away.

 

While they who live by labour, they whose fame

Rests not on fruitless song but on that strife

Whence come these solid walls and towers of life,

In lordly granite leave a lasting name.

 

These toil-built walls, they say, live after us

Who idly sing—and yet, beyond their ken,

Past crumbling towers and tombs, song-hungry men

Still listen to a lost Theocritus.

THE JERSEY MEADOWS

 

Dry reeds and rustling grasses wave

Amid the wintry cold;

The low sun bathes the city towers

In a tawny wash of gold.

 

Smoke-plumed, a phantom local drifts

Across a rush-lined floor

And melts into a hidden cave

On the Hudson’s terraced shore.

 

The dusk creeps down where waving sedge

Moves like a quiet breast,

And homebound toilers leave behind

Their island of unrest,

 

And peace, beside the river’s gloom

Where banked lights come to life,

Still frames and holds in quiet arms

Man’s fevered walls of strife.

NIGHT CLUB IN WAR-TIME

 

They are not glad; their youth is gone,

Yet here, to lethal staves,

They dream they are not standing on

A thousand distant graves.

 

Wine-flushed, they swarm and sing and joke

Along the chromium bar,

And the smoke they breathe is not the smoke

Of battlefields afar.

 

But, spurning terrors best forgot

Where gin for plasma runs,

They hear the throb of brass, and not

The throb of belching guns.

 

They dance and rest and watch and yawn

And from night’s quickened pace

Store up pale joy against the dawn

They stand too sad to face,

 

Since they are prisoners who pine

At feasts that leave them thin;

With grief that sours their sweetest wine,

With hemlock in their gin.

 

Life, life they ask, at any cost,

But loud their doom is read:

They in their gladness are the lost,

The wounded, and the dead!

THE LOVER IN THE SUBWAY

 

Builded of stone and steel they stand, the pride of our puny age;

Inlaid with granite and iron they run, the roads of our hurrying rage,

Arrogant cliffs of wonder and arroyos lamped with flame—

But each at the breath of Time shall vanish the way it came.

 

Bridges across dark waters, tunnels beneath the earth,

These shall be swept away as though they had known no birth

And the roofs and the marbled walls melt down to the waiting dust

And the turrets of stone be tumbled and the glories of steel be rust.

 

Cobweb and gossamer they, that the centuries brush aside

Where the eagle will build her nest in their pinnacled lofts of pride,

And the serpent along the street-curb and the grass in the empty square

Will give scant thought of the glory lost hands once fashioned there.

 

But out of the ruins one thing must triumph and live, My Own,

And that is our love, our deathless love, surviving all metal and stone;

Though cities go out like candles, though rivers dry up like dew,

Over the tombs of Time will echo my timeless cry for You.

 

Yet, here in the Subway murk, where the flailing wheels strike fire,

I wonder if men loved women in the time-lost streets of Tyre,

If a breast as soft as your breast and a heart as warm with trust

Can sleep but a drift of dust now under Cydonia’s dust?

THE SEEING-EYE DOG

 

I watched the dog that patient-eyed

Led on a sightless man

Grown glad to trust a silent guide

Where life so loudly ran.

 

Alert that leader of the blind

Explored the crowded street,

And, wise and voiceless, sought to find

A path for sightless feet.

 

Alert he saw the red turn green,

Then wove a tenuous way

Amid the wheels that purred between

The stop-lights’ steady play.

 

And I who tread life’s darkling maze

With no such silent friend,

And grope across Time’s tangled ways

And cannot see the end—

 

I ask that some mute faith of mine

May guide me to that goal

Where long-awaited light may shine

On man’s long-blinded soul.

MIDNIGHT IN WALL STREET

 

A curving lane of quietude

Their midday spate has grown

Where peace and pallid shadows brood

On windowed cliffs of stone.

 

The tumult of too fevered hours

Is lost in dusk and sleep

Where silence crowns the sullen towers

And night reigns doubly deep.

 

For they who sought the golden fleece

Have now foregone the quest;

Their maelstrom is a thing of peace,

Their mart a place of rest.

 

And where each grim wall skyward gropes

As slumber softens life,

It stands the grave of buried hopes,

The tomb of ghostly strife.

ROBIN IN GRAMERCY PARK

 

It flutes in the fading twilight,

It calls through the ghost-like trees,

And quick brings back my mothering North

And the balm of a pineland breeze.

 

Afar from the city’s tumult

Where Spring so emptily wakes

It carries me back to the balsam scent

And the breath of the plunging Lakes.

 

That note through the dusty twilight

Takes me out to a home of old

Where the afterglow on the pine-dark hills

Hung a tranquil crown of gold.

 

And the city becomes a ghost-land

With its ghostly years of strife

And the flute of a bird proclaims that peace

Is the final gift of life.

THE ART GALLERY AT DUSK

 

I lingered where the fading light

Fell ghostly on the gilded frames,

The painted faces touched with night,

The kings with half-forgotten names.

 

I stood where dusk and silence fell

On princes lost in robe and lace,

On lips of some long-vanished belle,

Some solemn burgher’s shadowed face.

 

And calm before my questing gaze,

In marbled sleep, white Venus stood,

The treasured dream of far-off days

Men called perfected womanhood.

 

But you, the living, breathing you,

Stepped close to where I mused alone;

And ghost-like all mere pictures grew

And Venus stood a block of stone.

THE PENGUIN AT THE PLAZA

 

Where the turrets of steel and granite

Loom dark in the smoke-dulled sky

The penguin, poised on the fountain’s rim,

Sent forth one dolorous cry.

 

The questioning cry of a sea-bird

In a rookery not its own,

That echoed up to the idling throng

And the terraced walls of stone.

 

A faltering cry for the ice-fields

Where the tundra meets the tide

And a low sun gilds the polar dunes

And the green-white icebergs ride.

 

And we mortals who heard that lone cry

Awaken and waver and climb,

We too took thought of some ghostly Home

Now lost in the mists of Time.

SPIDER UNDER BROOKLYN BRIDGE

 

I weave my silvered netting, thread by thread.

Silk-like and tremulous in shadowed air,

Small in this wider weaving overhead

Where thunder rolls and restless mortals fare.

 

From me they may have learned of strain and stress,

The woof that meets the warp and binds the net,

The tissued film that floats in nothingness

And leaves the tenuous cables firmly set.

 

I do not know; the ways of man are dim,

Who laughs at space and marries land to land.

Mayhap some wider bridge towers over him

With weavings he’s too small to understand.

NIGHT RAIN ON BROADWAY

 

Where deep the lamp-strewn canyon twines

Past shadowy tower and wall

Starred bright with bulbs and neon signs

Warm rain began to fall.

 

A sudden shower fell softly through

Their night that was not night

Where pavement pools of silvered blue

Flung back the scattered light.

 

The toil-worn curb became a brook

That rippled as it ran;

The square took on the empty look

Of lands unknown to man.

 

Where misted globes of red and green

Blinked restless through the rain

Their roadway of unrest lay clean

As a tree-lined country lane.

 

And April freshness touched the soul

Of all night’s huddled throng

As down their wearied valley stole

Rain’s lyric wash of song.

THE AVENUE IN WAR-TIME

 

I watch their women come and go

Along the street where flags still swing

And gowns instead of tulips glow

And hats instead of robins sing.

I see them seek their nylon hose

And scarfs as flimsy as a song

And slips as fragile as a rose;

And as they idly wander by

I see above that queenly throng

The old indifferent April sky.

 

But half a troubled world away

In blackened towns where shrilling planes

Sweep over tortured homes and spray

Quick death instead of April rains,

Gaunt women, groping through a pall

Of dust and smoke, go grim of brow

From rubbled heap to tumbled wall,

And in torn rooms where beams are piled

And all they prized is vanished now,

They dig to find a battered child.

PIGEON FEEDER IN BRYANT PARK

 

His life as faded as his coat,

He leans across his cane

And views each iridescent throat

That seeks his scattered grain.

 

Despite the frugal days he lives

He flouts greed’s ancient law,

And reigns a king, and kingly gives

To fill a pigeon’s craw.

 

Since his starved heart pale solace wrings

From hunger thus appeased

He in the midst of fluttering wings

Finds ghostlier hungers eased.

 

And sitting placid in the sun,

He hears the muted sound

Of moiling souls who blindly shun

The bird-like peace he’s found.

EAST-SIDE TEACHER

 

Behind her ink-stained desk, as on a bridge

Above a deck of upturned eyes,

She sits the captain of a noisy crew

That little cares where Knowledge lies.

 

Adroit, discreet, her sternness but a mask

To leave her mistress of tumultuous youth,

She trims the sails of discipline and steers

The devious course that leads to Truth.

 

Staid watcher of soft growth still April-small,

She, from the calm that Autumns bring,

Sees life reborn in yearly bursts of bloom

And old despairs made glad with Spring.

 

And sensing from the bud the open flower,

She guards those petals half-unfurled,

And in a casual hand made white with chalk

She holds and molds the coming world.

TO A CERTAIN MILLIONAIRE

 

“Much treasure will be mine when once I yield

This Sabine horde my City,” darkly mused

Tarpeia of the Gate,

“Much wealth of precious stone and golden shield.”

Rome fell to them,—this many a year was writ

The story of her fate

And how, for thanks, they flung their gold till bruised

And broken she lay dying under it.

 

So you, who gave long years to seek success,

You who betrayed that guarded citadel

Where burns life’s inner flame,

Forgetting all that is not bought or sold

And planning only how to onward press,

Are given what you claim,

And crowned at last by what you love so well

Lie smothered in your million bits of gold!

ARAN GIRL ON ELLIS ISLAND

 

She waits unwelcomed in the crowded room

That seems too sordid for a Door of Hope,

Her sea-grey eyes untouched with doubt or gloom,

Her old-world wealth a bundle tied with rope.

 

The young breast mounded under rustic frieze

May house new wonderments, but never fear,

As grim, untamed, she flairs the harbour breeze

And views the fabled towers that loom so near.

 

Yet half defiant, though forlorn, she feels

Scant terror at the land of toil and gold

So far from curraghs and from salty creels

And fog-draped islands that are dour and old.

 

For through her flows the blood of sea-cubbed men

Who warred and sang and roamed the Outer Isles

And heard the warning drums from glen to glen

And the call of pipes across embattled kyles.