You cross a checkerboard of stones,
where vagrants seek pennies for visions,
loop ranks of towering knights and pawns,
enter crenellated streets, where citied girls
thrall to stiletto heels and telephones.
The air is hot, it stinks of drying cloth
and through the feudal haze of fumes,
you follow merchants to the corn exchange,
past gilded mansions sprung from brittle bones,
to barter grain for heaps of gleaming gold.
Turn from the main thoroughfare,
observe the sallow faces sunk in ponds,
their severed hands with mangled finger ends
gathered by children in rags, ears clogged
by commerce. Witness their lives and deaths.
Dysentery and cholera slither through slums
while righteous men choke fortunes
from good worsted wool or khaki uniforms.
And, in dark mills, bright summer snow
rots lungs, drops poison onto cobblestones.
This city breathes through warp and weft,
builded with wool from godly lambs,
while cattle graze as ranks of clouds unfold.
Inside god’s house, the pious lift their voice as one,
fletch songs that rise in praise of burnished dreams.
Liz McPherson