Lake Front at Night / John Gould Fletcher

Lake Front at Night  (1917)  by John Gould Fletcher

from Poetry, December 1917

Lake Front at Night

Chicago skyline by night, 2912. Photo by Leandro Neumann Ciuffo. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

At the edge of a beautiful gulf of gloom and stillness
The city rises —
Glittering with millions of spangles
Seen between the dull smoke of the trains,
That struggle and tug laboriously
And bump empty freight-cars into each other
With a noise like surf collapsing.
 
Beyond there is windy darkness —
One or two lights low down
Seemingly blurred by mist,
And waterish stars;
For the wind is bringing rain
To stream down the spangled faces,
And make the light-terraces melt together
Growing more dim.
 
But the engines cough and call;
One or two lights in the silence
Watch the night shutting slowly down dark doors on the city.
Behind her spangled mask
She frowns a little, standing more weary,
But still casting out on the darkness
Her glory, where winds will whirl it
Through dry splinters of grass on the dunes.

This poem is in the public domain