"the sea's listless chime: / Time's self it is, made audible, / The murmur of the earth's own shell"

For Poetry Monday, another bit of nature versus urban life.


Subway Wind, Claude McKay

Far down, down through the city’s great gaunt gut
    The gray train rushing bears the weary wind;
In the packed cars the fans the crowd’s breath cut,
    Leaving the sick and heavy air behind.
And pale-cheeked children seek the upper door
    To give their summer jackets to the breeze;
Their laugh is swallowed in the deafening roar
    Of captive wind that moans for fields and seas;
Seas cooling warm where native schooners drift
    Through sleepy waters, while gulls wheel and sweep,
Waiting for windy waves the keels to lift
    Lightly among the islands of the deep;
Islands of lofty palm trees blooming white
    That led their perfume to the tropic sea,
Where fields lie idle in the dew-drenched night,
    And the Trades float above them fresh and free.


McKay was a Jamaican-American poet and novelist of the Harlem Renaissance.

---L.

Subject quote from "The Sea-Limits," Dante Gabriel Rossetti.