Breakers and granite / by John Gould Fletcher [electronic text]

NEW YORK SKETCHES

OVERLOOKING THE HUDSON, AUTUMN

A tinge of russet, purple, blue; vague heights, Ribbons of turquoise threaded with russet-brown; A sail of thin silk quivers like a butterfly, By chimneys and a long squat bulk with towers.

Slim motionless tree-stems are carelessly scattered, Like points of exclamation in the stillness. A brown-hulled boat buzzes about in the foreground, A slow barge loaded deep with painted bars of steel Glows like a heap of rubies.

Haze curls, drifts, floats, subsides, and lifts itself; Making the distance delicately unreal, As a pearl cloud upon the sky;Masking the river like a stream of silk.

Will this water-Colour ecstasy, This delicate fan of cool tones blending,. Consume the great Mack factories yonder, Or will the factories shatter it?

CENTRAL PARK

A frieze in movement, Faces to the sunlight, Curved necks, keen ears, long sweep of splendid tails, Quivering hoofs rattling, Keen flanks quivering, Like flames the millionaires pass in the morning; Out of the earth they seem to spring, And pass Clattering, Between the windblown clouds and the motionless mournful trees. These are the children of the sun: Carelessly galloping Towards the dull wavering storm-cloud uprising with mutters and flashes of flame, With tragic unseeing smiles They go on.

BROADWAY'S CANYON

I

This is like the nave of an unfinished cathedral With steep shadowy sides. Light and shade alternate, Repeat and die away. Golden traceries of sunlight, Blue buttresses of shadow, Answer like pier and column, All the way down to the sea.

But the temple is still roofless: Only the sky above it Closes it round, encircling With its weightless vault of blue. There is no image or inscription or altar, And the clamour of free-moving multitudes Are its tireless organ tones, While the hammers beat out its chimes.

II

Blue grey smoke swings heavily,Fuming from leaden censers, Upwards about the street. Lamps glimmer with crimson points of flame. The black canyon Bares its gaunt, stripped sides. Heavily, oppressively, the skies roll on above it, Like curses yet unfulfilled. The wind shrieks-and crashes, The burly trucks rumble; Ponderous as funeral-cars, undraped, and unstrewn with flowers.

THE ALLEYWAYS

Between the square resolute buildings That shatter and refract the sun, Hidden away the alleyways Mourn in blue gloom.

A cart is unloading square cases, It rattles on the granite and disappears. A man slinks in as if some hidden sin Followed him with its fears.

When the streets are freshly lighted, And the pleasure-lamps know their power; Down the worn stairways of the alleyways, The ghosts creep —it is their hour.

In a blue mist half-wavering, They choke up the alleyway: Amid the slush and the rubbish, They clutter grey.

All the failures and incomplete efforts, Are theirs to toil with and keep: They seem to be striving to build dream-castles While the city is asleep.

In the morning up the dizzy-limbed ladders, That crawl down into the muck, Wearily the nimble ghosts lift themselves, Like blue smoke.

A cart is unloading square cases, It rumbles away with a bitter refrain; And the sense of effort unfinished, Throbs and thumps at each window pane.

OLD JEWISH CEMETERY

Barred in on three sides by dark windowed buildings, They wait, the exiles who afar were scattered; After so many centuries, United here at last. The city does not heed them, It does not think on old lips worn with praying, On old eyes grey with sorrow, On old hands folded with grief. After so many centuries, The stones stand here upon an alien soil. In the midst of the hurry and scorn of a too eager city, — Until Jerusalem rises like a bride, Out of some great new daybreak; Facing the hidden far-off east, they wait.

LONGUE VUE

Across the Hudson, a mile away, loom pale brown cliffs, the Palisades: On the verandah here, bored couples eat, lifting their tea in jewelled hands. Between them goes the river seaward, frowning brown shadow, naked light. A steamer cuts through it, shooting outwards ripples in patterns of blue and brown. Gods of this land who shaped these cliffs, whose fireless altars no one heeds, Make peace between me and these rocks, let me not face their force in vain; Be in my heart a barrier, as clean and cold and stark as these, To shut out sense of silken hose and gewgawed ornaments of lawns.

December 1914—June 1920.