I rained quite a lot, that spring.
You woke in the
And saw the sky still clouded, the streets still wet,
But nobody noticed so much, except the
And the people who parade.
You don't, in a city.
The parks got very green.
All the trees were
Far into July and August, heavy with leaf,
Heavy with leaf and the long roots were boring and spreading,
But nobody noticed that but the city
And they didn't talk. Oh, on Sundays, perhaps, you'd notice:
Walking through certain blocks, by the shut, proud
With the windows boarded, the people gone away,
You'd suddenly see the queerest small shoots of
Poking through cracks and crevices in the
And a bird-sown flower, red on the balcony,
But then you made jokes about grass growing in the
And politics and grass-roots –– and there were
And gags and a musical show called "Hot and Wet."It all made a good box for the papers.
When the
Flew into a meeting of the Board of Estimate,
The new Mayor acted at once and called the photographers.
When the first green creeper crawled over the Brooklyn Bridge,
They thought it was ornamental.
They let it stay.
There was the year the termites came to New
And they don't do well in cold climates –– but listen,
Joe,
They're only ants and ants are nothing but insects.
It was funny and yet rather wistful, in a way(As Heywood Broun pointed out in the World-Telegram,)To think of them looking for wood in a steel city.
It made you feel about life.
It was too divine.
There were funny pictures by all the smart, funny
And Macy's ran a terribly clever ad:"The Widow's Termite" or something. There was
Disturbance.
Even the Communists didn't
And say they were Morgan hirelings.
It was too hot,
Too hot to protest, too hot to get excited,
An even,
African heat, lush, fertile and steamy,
That soaked into bones and mind and never once broke.
The warm rain fell in fierce showers and ceased and fell.
Pretty soon you got used to its always being that way.
You got used to the changed rhythm, the altered beat,
To people walking slower, to the whole
Fierce pulse of the city slowing, to men in shorts,
To the new sun-helmets from Best's and the cops' white uniforms,
And the long noon-rest in the offices, everywhere.
It wasn't a plan or anything.
It just happened.
The fingers tapped the keys slower, the
Dozed on their benches, the bookkeeper yawned at his desk.
The A.
T. & T. was the first to change the
And establish a siesta-room,
But they were always efficient.
Mostly it
Happened like sleep itself, like a tropic sleep,
Till even the Thirties were deserted at
Except for a few tourists and one damned cop.
They ran boats to see the big lilies on the North
But it was only the tourists who really
The flocks of rose-and-green parrots and
Nesting in the stone crannies of the Cathedral.
The rest of us had forgotten when they first came.
There wasn't any real change, it was just a heat spell,
A rain spell, a funny summer, a weather-man's joke,
In spite of the geraniums three feet
In the tin-can gardens of Hester and Desbrosses.
New York was New York.
It couldn't turn inside out.
When they got the news from Woods Hole about the Gulf Stream,
The Times ran an adequate story.
But nobody reads those stories but science-cranks.
Until, one day, a somnolent
Gave a new cub the termite yarn to break his teeth on.
The cub was just down from Vermont, so he took the time.
He was serious about it.
He went around.
He read all about termites in the Public
And it made him sore when they fired him. So, one evening,
Talking with an old watchman, beside the
Raw girders of the new Planetopolis Building(Ten thousand brine-cooled offices, each with shower)He saw a dark line creeping across the
And turned a flashlight on it. "Say, buddy," he said,"You'd better look out for those ants.
They eat wood, you know,
They'll have your shack down in no time." The watchman spat."Oh, they've quit eating wood," he said, in a casual voice,"I thought everyone knew that." -- and reaching down,
He pried from the insect's jaw the bright crumb of steel.
From
NG
TY, by Stephen Vincent Benét, published by Farrar & Rinehart,
New York, 1936, pp. 69-72.
This poem is an alarming precursor to our present-day concerns about global-warming.
Green parrots by the way have been nesting in Brooklyn for over 20 years, and in the last 5 years pelicans have begun to nest in the Long Island tidal marshes.
Charley Noble
