The city slowly wakes:
Her every chimney makes
Offering of smoke against the cool white skies:
Slowly the morning shakes
The lingering shadowy flakes
Of night from doors and windows, from the city's eyes.
A breath through heaven goes:
Leaves of the pale sweet rose
Are strewn along the clouds of upper air.
Healer of ancient woes,
The palm of dawn bestows
On feverish temples peace, comfort on grim despair.
Now the celestial fire
Fingers the sunken spire;
Crocket by crocket slowly creepeth down;
Brushes the maze of wire,
Dewy, electric lyre,
And with a silent hymn one moment fills the town.
Over emergent roofs
A sound of pattering hoofs
And anxious bleatings tells the passing herd:
Scared by the piteous droves,
A shoal of skurrying doves,
Veering, around the island of the church has whirred.
Soon through the smoky haze,
The park begins to raise
Its outlines clearer into daylit prose:
Ever with fresh amaze
The sleepless fountains praise
Morn, that has gilt the city as it gilds the rose.
High in the clearer air
The smoke now builds a stair
Leading to realms no wing of bird has found:
Things are more foul, more fair;
A distant clock, somewhere,
Strikes, and the dreamer starts at clear reverberant sound.
Farther the tide of dark
Drains from each square and park:
Here is a city fresh and new create,
Wondrous as though the ark
Should once again disbark
On a remoulded world its safe and joyous freight.
Ebbs all the dark, and now
Life eddies to and fro
By pier and alley, street and avenue:
The myriads stir below,
As hives of coral grow—
Vaulted above, like them, with a fresh sea of blue.
Charles de Kay.