The Office Building
We kissed there in the stone entrance,
In the great cool stone mouth of the building,
Before it took you.
We kissed under the granite arches.
And then you turned and were gone
And high about and above were the hard towered walls,
The terrible weights of stone, relentless,
But for the moment they had been kind to us,
Folding us with arms
While we kissed.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 4, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The Office Building” appeared in The Liberator, issue 10 (1918).
Helen Hoyt
Helen Hoyt was born in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1887 and received her AB from Barnard College in 1909. She worked as the associate editor of Poetry magazine and authored several poetry collections, including Poems of Amis (R. J. Hoffmann, 1946); The Name of a Rose (Helen Gentry, 1931); Leaves of Wild Grape (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929); and Apples Here in My Basket (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1924).
Hoyt died in Saint Helena, California in 1972.