| |
| HUMMING and creaking, the car down the street | |
| Lumbered and lurched through thunderous gloam, | |
| Bearing us, spent and dumb with the heat, | |
| From office and counter and factory home: | |
| |
| Sallow-faced clerks, genteel in black; | 5 |
| Girls from the laundries, draggled and dank; | |
| Ruddy-faced laborers slouching slack; | |
| A broken actor, grizzled and lank; | |
| |
| A mother with querulous babe on her lap; | |
| A schoolboy whistling under his breath; | 10 |
| An old man crouched in a dreamless nap; | |
| A widow with eyes on the eyes of death; | |
| |
| A priest; a sailor with deep-sea gaze; | |
| A soldier in scarlet with waxed moustache; | |
| A drunken trollop in velvet and lace; | 15 |
| All silent in that tense dusk …. when a flash | |
| |
| Of lightning shivered the sultry gloom: | |
| With shattering brattle the whole sky fell | |
| About us, and rapt to a dazzling doom | |
| We glided on in a timeless spell, | 20 |
| |
| Unscathed through deluge and flying fire | |
| In a magical chariot of streaming glass, | |
| Cut off from our kind and the world’s desire, | |
| Made one by the awe that had come to pass. | |
| |
