THE DAWN

New York’s dawn holds
four mud pillars,
and a hurricane of black doves,
paddling in foul water.

New York’s dawn
moans on vast stairways,
searching on the ledges,
for anguished tuberoses.

Dawn breaks and no one’s mouth breathes it,
since hope and tomorrow, here, have no meaning.
Sometimes coins, furiously swarming,
stab and devour the abandoned children.

The first to go outside know in their bones
Paradise will not be there, nor wild loves.
They know they go to the swamp of law, and numbers,
to play without art, and labour without fruit.

The light is buried by chains and by noise,
in the shameless challenge, of rootless science.
All across the suburbs, sleepless crowds stumble,
as if saved, by the moment, from a shipwreck of blood.