Night Movement — New York / Carl Sandburg

Night Movement — New York

In the night, when the sea-winds take the city in their arms,
And cool the loud streets that kept their dust noon and afternoon;
In the night, when the sea-birds call to the lights of the city,
The lights that cut on the skyline their name of a city;
In the night, when the trains and wagons start from a long way off
For the city where the people ask bread and want letters;
In the night the city lives too — the day is not all.
In the night there are dancers dancing and singers singing,
And the sailors and soldiers look for numbers on doors.
In the night the sea-winds take the city in their arms.

~~
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
from Smoke and Steel, 1920

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

Carl Sandburg biography

Mike Warot, Chicago at Night, 2010. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

Sea Gulls / Jeanette Marks

Sea Gulls

On Leaving Eggemoggin

Sea gulls I saw lifting the dawn with rosy feet,
Bearing the sunlight on their wings,
Dripping the dusk from burnished plumes;
And I thought
It would be a joy to be a sea gull
At dusk, at dawn of way,
And through long sunlit hours.

Sea gulls I saw carrying the night on their backs,
Wide tail spread crescent for the moon and stars –
The moon a glowing jelly fish,
The stars foam flecks of light;
And I thought
It would be joy to be a sea gull!

How I would dart with them,
Strike storm with coral spur,
Rip whirling spray of angry tides,
Snatch mangled, light-shot offal of the sea,–
Torn, tossed, and moving terribly;
And stare for stare anser those myriad eyes
That float and sway, stab, sting, and die away!

How I would peer from wide cold eyes of fire –
At dusk, at dawn
And through the long daylight –
Into those coiling depths of sea;
Then split the sun, the moon, the stars,
With laughter, laughter, laughter,
For the sea's mad power!

~~
Jeanette Marks (1874-1964)
from Willow Pollen, 1921

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

Jeanette Marks biography

The City Revisited / Stephen Vincent Benét

The City Revisited

The grey gulls drift across the bay
Softly and still as flakes of snow
Against the thinning fog.  All day
I sat and watched them come and go;
And now at last the sun was set,
Filling the waves with colored fire
Till each seemed like a jewelled spire
Thrust up from some drowned city.  Soon
From peak and cliff and minaret
The city's lights began to wink,
Each like a friendly word.  The moon
Began to broaden out her shield,
Spurting with silver.  Straight before
The brown hills lay like quiet beasts
Stretched out beside a well-loved door,
And filling earth and sky and field
With the calm heaving of their breasts.

Nothing was gone, nothing was changed,
The smallest wave was unestranged
By all the long ache of the years
Since last I saw them, blind with tears.
Their welcome like the hills stood fast:
And I, I had come home at last.

So I laughed out with them aloud
To think that now the sun was broad,
And climbing up the iron sky,
Where the raw streets stretched sullenly
About another room I knew,
In a mean house — and soon there, too,
The smith would burst the flimsy door
And find me lying on the floor.
Just where I fell the other night,
After that breaking wave of pain. —
How they will storm and rage and fight,
Servants and mistress, one and all,
"No money for the funeral!"

I broke my life there.  Let it stand
At that.
                 The waters are a plain,
Heaving and bright on either hand,
A tremulous and lustral peace
Which shall endure though all things cease,
Filling my heart as water fills
A cup.  There stand the quiet hills.
So, waiting for my wings to grow,
I watch the gulls sail to and fro,
Rising and falling, soft and swift,
Drifting along as bubbles drift.
And, though I see the face of God
Hereafter — this day have I trod
Nearer to Him than I shall tread
Ever again.  The night is dead.
And there's the dawn, poured out like wine
Along the dim horizon-line.
And from the city comes the chimes —

We have our heaven on earth — sometimes!

~~
Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)
from Young Adventure: A book of poems, 1918

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

Stephen Vincent Benét biography

"The City Revisited" read by Brian Ness for LibriVox. Courtesy Good Audio Books.

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