A group of college students takes a stroll the morning after September 11th
The stripling season’s light – timeless but tirelessly untrue.
No matter – bright is that penultimate geometry felt round
a sensible world,
To which the goosefleshed credence of morning itself empurples
kindly waters in their wane.
A bargain of cold Providence and older daylight is terribly plenty:
Returning morning’s umbrage and forethought, warm,
to this place preluded not by myth, but color;
If it cannot be told why the elm trees shed themselves
before this year’s almanacs had,
Deepening their orange preludes
above the surface of the reflecting pond,
To which Boston Common’s swans swam headway
over the floating flotsam of.
Those human sentimentalists squat closely off the shore
And toss with penny-pinching gestures of charity –
Johnnycakes, cereal and barley grain, water biscuits –
To Boston Common’s feeding pool,
Feeding the swans, famining to and fro.
And we circled around the unassuming pond, thrice feeding
The swans into the hour of our unassuming business.
The birds circumscribing a world round
their unagonized selves. We wondered
Nevertheless when we shall separate this little meaning from
the heart of our own matters.
Down Boylston Street, one ordered toast and aperitifs. Another said,
“Tomorrow we will glad let our Cultures of Credence pass, feeding
the birds, though only they remain.”
This is all one nation’s unconscious knows:
What sad Sophocles to Churchill found,
having heartened from history to hearth.
This is all two millennia’s unconscious has learned:
Here and there looking on at cold huddles of the swans,
Feeding the devoutest progress of the birds.
Maxwell Tang
Maxwell Tang is a young writer whose work pays homage to the crux of being human.
