Waking of a City

WE fools who cannot sleep have heard it waken
So many times
We cannot count, a giant roughly shaken,
For whom no chimes
Make glad the housewife, send the man afield:
Its matin call
Is noise, the many-voiced and many-wheeled,
Where noise is all —

The growling dawn, and then the sullen roaring
From street to street,
Then human life within the hopper pouring
With hurried feet,
The crowded street cars, women hip to hip
With men unclean,
Crushed in the nauseating fellowship
Of day’s machine.

Oh, I have seen the dawn above a mountain
That floods the plain,
Where life wells up, like water from a fountain,
All sweet again,
Have seen the world awaken like a child
With eyes of blue,
That stretched its arms, breathed deeply then, and smiled
That night was through.

But cities have no peaks, they have but valleys,
No verdant breast,
From restless sleep crawl out of darkened alleys
To day’s unrest.
On streets stone-curbed the first gray shadows break,
And lives stone-curbed,
For at the dawning cities do not wake —
They are disturbed.