A View Of The Harbor (1)

Coolly the fire of the drowning day
    skips from glass to glass across the bay;
time by time it measures our despair,
    note by note, as if it did not care.

Night follows: and then, across the night
    marches the fury of mercuric light,
the cranes twist into archaic dark,
    impassioned monsters in a monstrous park —

Free at last from pain of human need,
    our shadows capture our desires and feed;
power, humming in sixty-cycle trance
    teaches its dancing-masters how to dance;

fantastic poisons, housed in spheres of gloom
    rejoice and glower, moons and suns of doom,
iron growing from an iron ground
    a chorus fills the iron sky with sound —

Ah, but each hair in place, the gods of day
    dream of sad gold, and turn their heads away.