by Danielle, 18
Newark Academy, Florham Park, New Jersey
Concrete piled high on water, colored gray.
Shadows, or are they statues, creating edges
showing the skyline of tall and short images
where planes fly above with smoke colored gray.
Or does the sky act as a vacuum absorbing all the dust,
drawing it up into clouds?
Along the tops of buildings
do dreams fall like pieces of dust?
The idea of New York runs chaotic.
Bright lights and crowds of people
have tainted it. We can dream up the blurs of yellow,
under our covers as if we knew what was real,
or as if to prove ourselves we are not sheltered.
The names of taxi drivers do not exist,
Their names collected into piles of people
—just the way we are forgotten
we forget.
Dreamt cities are much brighter than the real ones,
replacing lights with loud darkness:
and men run through stations in nervousness,
profiles seen and ignored, like crowds of one.
Are they oblivious, or can the people choose awareness?
–What suits efficiency best, may not always
be efficient; darkness screaming as loud as lights can spark.
More delicate than the light is the dust on rooftops.
Written in Response to “The Map” by Elizabeth Bishop