On a Ferry passing New York City in January / Michael Strange

On a Ferry Passing New York City in January

To-night there will be snow.
On my left beholding
Those rearing contours
Vastly built,
Tallest exclamations of greed itself
– Becoming ever more ghostly –
As around their base
And languidly curling like incense,
Smoke, from furnaces nourishing
To the lust of trades,
Beholding these builded reflections
Waving their night-blue columns
Between ice floes,
Beholding their roofs
Conicaled! templed! pyramided!
Becoming lost amongst the skies!
Sorrowing obscurity,
Beholding gulls, dawn-coloured,
Shrieking from ice block to ice block
Over gashes of deadening black water;
Aye, listening to the silence of the wind,
Oppressed within the limned hollows of the air,
I know there to be among the heavens
Torrents of white dust,
A whisper from chaos awaiting
To descend,
Plunging us all
In pale glittering confusion –
For to-night there will be snow.

~~

Michael Strange (1890-1950)

from Poems, 1919

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]

Michael Strange biography