The Giants

There was a town without roof tops,
there was a town without towers,
and down between walls without cover
the sunlight tumbled pure;
and all through the bursting autumn
the wild leaves drifted their floors.

But winter! — their winter was wisdom;
their heroes grew quickly then:
they ate at ice-deep tables
with fists of frozen rain;
their eyes were the lightning of rivers
beneath storms of skating men.

And when they stood for conversing,
majestic and patient-browed,
snow-haired and frosty-templed,
they flexed like roots in ground,
and flashed their glances wide.

Till all their rooms were pygmied;
they leaned on the tops of walls,
looked down on the streets below them,
tiny and drifted and still,
and trembled the borealis
with their own, fierce, arctic yell.