Foliage: Various Poems | Page 8

voice as a man conceives;?Nor ever dreamt the silent misery?That solemn organ brought to homeless men.?I heard the drums and soft brass instruments,?Led by the silver cornets clear and high--?Whose sounds turned playing children into stones.
I saw at night the City's lights shine bright,?A greater milky way; how in its spell?It fascinated with ten thousand eyes;?Like those sweet wiles of an enchantress who?Would still detain her knight gone cold in love;?It was an iceberg with long arms unseen,?That felt the deep for vessels far away.?All things seemed strange, I stared like any child?That pores on some old face and sees a world?Which its familiar granddad and his dame?Hid with their love and laughter until then.?My feet had not yet felt the cruel rocks?Beneath the pleasant moss I seemed to tread.?But soon my ears grew weary of that din,?My eyes grew tired of all that flesh and stone;?And, as a snail that crawls on a smooth stalk,?Will reach the end and find a sharpened thorn--?So did I reach the cruel end at last.?I saw the starving mother and her child,?Who feared that Death would surely end its sleep,?And cursed the wolf of Hunger with her moans.?And yet, methought, when first I entered there,?Into that city with my wondering mind,?How marvellous its many sights and sounds;?The traffic with its sound of heavy seas?That have and would again unseat the rocks.?How common then seemed Nature's hills and fields?Compared with these high domes and even streets,?And churches with white towers and bodies black.?The traffic's sound was music to my ears;?A sound of where the white waves, hour by hour,?Attack a reef of coral rising yet;?Or where a mighty warship in a fog,?Steams into a large fleet of little boats.?Aye, and that fog was strange and wonderful,?That made men blind and grope their way at noon.?I saw that City with fierce human surge,?With millions of dark waves that still spread out?To swallow more of their green boundaries.?Then came a day that noise so stirred my soul,?I called them hellish sounds, and thought red war?Was better far than peace in such a town.
To hear that din all day, sometimes my mind?Went crazed, and it seemed strange, as I were lost?In some vast forest full of chattering apes.?How sick I grew to hear that lasting noise,?And all those people forced across my sight,?Knowing the acres of green fields and woods?That in some country parts outnumbered men;?In half an hour ten thousand men I passed--?More than nine thousand should have been green trees.?There on a summer's day I saw such crowds?That where there was no man man's shadow was;?Millions all cramped together in one hive,?Storing, methought, more bitter stuff than sweet.?The air was foul and stale; from their green homes?Young blood had brought its fresh and rosy cheeks,?Which soon turned colour, like blue streams in flood.?Aye, solitude, black solitude indeed,?To meet a million souls and know not one;?This world must soon grow stale to one compelled?To look all day at faces strange and cold.?Oft full of smoke that town; its summer's day?Was darker than a summer's night at sea;?Poison was there, and still men rushed for it,?Like cows for acorns that have made them sick.?That town was rich and old; man's flesh was cheap,?But common earth was dear to buy one foot.?If I must be fenced in, then let my fence?Be some green hedgerow; under its green sprays,?That shake suspended, let me walk in joy--?As I do now, in these dear months I love.
? END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, FOLIAGE ***
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