Buildings rising
like towers of Babel,
standing in mute celebration,
to the dream,
the American Dream,
with its contradictions
living with abject beauty
and possibility,
all held in the skyline,
the ever present skyline,
dominated by the
Empire State,
and the Freedom Tower
as the symbols of defiance.
Racing, pacing
life, with workers
walking with urgency
and tourists walking
with awe at
the size and
the grandness
of the Dream,
this masculine dream
that is the heartbeat
of the city,
and as strong as
the bull on Wall Street.
Vendors plying their
wares among the
smells of foods
that mingle with ethnicity,
and the divergent sounds
of people from
across the planet
that ceaselessly
echo in gasps and stories
in the City that never sleeps.
Cities of the City winding
like dormant snakes
around the Hudson
and boats splashing endlessly
through the waters
that carried the
millions of frightened souls
who came
to this New World
through Ellis Island
and left their legacy
in this land of
dreams and opportunity.
Horns blowing
across the multi-coloured ocean
of cars that wriggle
their way around
trucks and buses
and the ever
curious tourists
that look up,
with cameras poised,
to the endless buildings,
the giants in the sky,
erect and secure
with their threatening poses.
Homeless ones,
sleeping rough on benches
do not look up
but always down,
for their dream
is not the American Dream,
and their silent faces
are painted into the
background of
an ever changing
canvas of cityscape,
dotted with flecks of
soothing green oasis,
and the gardened miracle
of Central Park,
that takes you
out of the city
only to throw you
back in again.
And in lower Manhattan
the absence and presence
of the Twins
reminds all of the
fragility of the Dream,
and the tourists
and those who still mourn
stand looking down
in silence
into the flowing water
of the dark grey memorials
that sit stark in memory
surrounded by names
now forgotten and remembered
from that day and
those images of fiery destruction.
Then uptown
the energy and enthusiasm
of Times Square
and Little Italy,
with its sprawl
and wave of people
all caught up and lively
in this world,
this surreal place,
of food, shops and tradition
that exists out of time
and location, more
as an ideal and wish for the Old World
than any tangible cultural place.
The crowds flow,
ever flow,
in search
of the ideal,
wanting to take
in the imposing grandeur
of the greatest
American city,
but a city also
of ambiguity and tension
about the American dream:
patriotic but open,
always pluralistic
but never easy to define,
as its cultures and languages
gush like the river
through the city.
And the crowds
move to the steamy
presence of the subway,
with its clattering trains
and grungy mysterious
corners with people
clambering in and
racing to catch
the last train and
the first,
looking at each other
but never looking.
This is New York,
the city of dreams and
the place of despair,
of lofty heights,
of shops aglow
with neon,
of beeping horns,
and drifting masses
of people that flow
around the streets,
in and out of shops,
through the shadows
and the patches of
light in love,
hate and admiration.
This is New York,
the living and breathing
anima and animus
of the American soul,
watched over by
the grand Statue,
whose torch and
green copper radiance
reminds the masses
that the ideal of liberty
is still present,
still a gentle call
in the streaming life
of the present,
still an echo
from a past
that shapes today.
15/7/2016