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This almost needs no comment. The theme and the rhythms are uncanny, beautiful, sublime. I don’t know if it’s a perfect poem, like Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Shelley presents a singular picture with a rhythm urgent yet calm. This poem roams a bit, but, in its way, perhaps it is perfect. The speaker is implied, is missing, and wants to be known, but we don’t know her. Or maybe we do. It is us, wandering New York, today.
Few dare, and even fewer achieve, these days, a poem as formally powerful as this.
Parody, that is, sublimity seen in glimpses, is fairly common. Maybe 20% of poets can pull it off. But a serious work, profound throughout, like this one, is extremely rare.
The music reminds me of Auden. Not Shelley. Not quite that good. But in the same realm. Do poems get standing ovations?
Poems like this—it found its way to Facebook about 2 days ago and currently has 78 likes—need to be published and collected, reproduced and praised, that a renaissance in poetry (what are we afraid of?) might return.
The poet is Yana Djin.
Morning in New York
If the desert is amnesia,
this city is a tomb.
The stone, as if in a seizure,
erupts from the earth’s womb.
Cinder, rock, scraps of metal
strewn along the ridge.
The D train with a rattle
crosses the Manhattan Bridge.
Blueswoman sings a ballad
with a voice rough and hoarse
about some Southern harlot
and Julliette-the-horse
Take the train to the water.
Lose your thoughts, strip your mind.
Not a thing you can alter.
And the sun is blind.
Coney Island is bare.
Bums and seagulls roam.
Frozen Wonder Wheel stares
like the ruins of Rome.
Buy the bums some booze,
Give the seagulls wet bread.
And feel love like Lazarus
rise from the dead.
