Song of the City at Night
Published in Poem Of The Day
Whatever hid the sun and moon inside a mountain
brought people there to found the night
where a city swans on river water
laving with light each passing wake,
mesmerizing a couple on the riverbrink.
They seem unaware what is myth
or real, taken up, as it were, by a swan's bill
and flown to a milkwater world
where it's possible to drink only the milk
and eat pearls. A gunshot, a siren
interrupts the quiet. Something is thrown
into the river, then the swan is mute.
To sing of this the swan would have to out-swan
itself, Sibelius out-Sibelius Sibelius.
About this poem
"I like this loose sonnet of mine, unrhymed but for internals, still with a strong turn in the middle of line 10. It's part of a series of city poems that I'm working on. This poem started, I suppose, in Astoria, N.Y., near Hell Gate Bridge. Jean Sibelius is a favorite composer of mine."
-Carol Frost
About Carol Frost
Carol Frost is the author of "Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences" (Tupelo Press, 2014). She teaches at Rollins College in Florida and spends her summers in upstate New York.
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(c) 2015 Carol Frost. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate
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