“The City Cosmic,” by Roy Ivan Johnson, from The Fourth Watch

The City Cosmic

This morning
The lure of the street
Entangled my feet
And I walked … and walked … and walked …

I turned into the narrowest streets, I breathed the smoke of the factories, I smelled the reek and rot of the tenements;
I passed by ancient spacious lawns and piles of masonry century-old, the pride of the city fathers;
I walked through parks and down the singing boulevards …
And I discovered what a cosmic thing a city is.

Dirt….
Congestion…
A heap of rubbish…

Blocks and stones and buildings;
White granitoid, smoked gray, like second-day collars of respectability;
Whistle-topped, grim-eyed factories;
The air, heavy with the aroma of coal-tar gas and the packing-house;
A network of wires and rails;
Bill-boards, the sign of the dollar.

Squares of artificial landscape called parks and gardens;
A sea of roofs and chimneys…
Houses … and houses … and houses …
Time’s driftwood packed together by the force of the tide!
And that is the city:
A huge mass of Material,
Looped and bound by the oily-black ribbon of the boulevards green-selvedged in the spring.

The people
Are not the city.
They infest the city, as rats and roaches the driftwood left high on the bank —
Or they build the city, as a beaver builds its dam, bit by bit.
Yet, the people and the city are very much alike.
They are like two mirrors, each reflecting the other,
For those who do not make the city are made by the city.

At dusk
The smoky-bright,
Soft-calling night
Led me again through streets … and streets … and streets…

I mingled with late-shopping crowds, I rubbed against the clay-crusted garments of laborers, I watched the rush for clinging-space on a Main Street car;

I heard the drone of the beggar in the doorway with his pencils and shoestrings, I met women in brilliant coats — with painted cheeks ghost-white, I caught the innocent laugh of whirling youth from a flashing car;

I noted the unblinking eyes of the hypnotized throng of cinema-worshippers pouring in and out past the shrieking posters flaming red and yellow;

I listened to the incessant colloquy of the city’s victims and creators rising like the shrill hum of a steel-cutting wheel;

I passed into the quieter and poorer streets and saw the ill-clad mothers of children, born and unborn, taking the early spring air of a front doorstep overlooking the pavement, and as I passed they looked at me with eyes unfearing and curious;

I glimpsed half-way down a dim deserted street a figure that slunk, thief-like, into the mouth of
an alley;

I walked upon the boulevard and saw through the windows of the rich the luxury of wealth;

I turned into the park — and there was love, twin-souled, ecstatic, gripping with twining fingers the edge of Passion;

And I sat upon a smooth-worn bench and gazed with new understanding at the evening star….
And I thought what a cosmic thing the population of a city is.

Souls….
Souls that harbor ignorance and are cramped in the cage their ignorance has built;
Helpless souls,
That sit on doorsteps and breathe the smell of refuse;
Dust-dwelling souls,
Whose wings have atrophied;
Striving, struggling, suffering souls,
Toiling in the net;
Strong, soaring souls,
That seek the sunlight in the open ;
Souls that murmur, and tired-eyed souls that are mute;
Souls of youth, wild-flowered, tossing their wind-tangled hair!
And that is the population of a city:

Souls … souls …
House-huddled souls …
Bound to the earth by soiled pink ropes of clay …
Bound by earth to earth …
Bound … bound …

From The Fourth Watch: A Book of Poems, by Roy Ivan Johnson
Boston: The Cornhill Company, 1920

Available on the Internet Archive: Link.