Twilight on Sixth Avenue / Charles G.D. Roberts

Twilight on Sixth Avenue

Over the tops of the houses
    Twilight and sunset meet.
The green, diaphanous dusk
    Sinks to the eager street.

Astray in the tangle of roofs
    Wanders a wind of June.
The dial shines in the clock-tower
    Like the face of a strange-scrawled moon.

The narrowing lines of the houses
    Palely begin to gleam,
And the hurrying crowds fade softly
    Like an army in a dream.

Above the vanishing faces
    A phantom train flares on
With a voice that shakes the shadows, –
    Diminishes, and is gone.

And I walk with the journeying throng
    In such a solitude
As where a lonely ocean
    Washes a lonely wood.

~~
Charles G.D. Roberts (1860-1943)
from The Book of the Native, 1896

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

Charles G.D. Roberts biography