Page:Foliage, various poems.djvu/66

 Into that city with my wondering mind,

How marvellous its many sights and sounds;

The traffic with its sound of heavy seas

That have and would again unseat the rocks.

How common then seemed Nature's hills and fields

Compared with these high domes and even streets,

And churches with white towers and bodies black.

The traffic's sound was music to my ears;

A sound of where the white waves, hour by hour,

Attack a reef of coral rising yet;

Or where a mighty warship in a fog,

Steams into a large fleet of little boats.

Aye, and that fog was strange and wonderful,

That made men blind and grope their way at noon.

I saw that City with fierce human surge,

With millions of dark waves that still spread out

To swallow more of their green boundaries.

Then came a day that noise so stirred my soul,

I called them hellish sounds, and thought red war

Was better far than peace in such a town.