.
Downtown
Like an iron maze,
Clustered close, towers rise,
Caging the very sky.
Casting their cold gaze
Through myriad glazed eyes
Apathetically.
Beneath, the streets swell
With jostling crowds of masks.
Their blank stares never meet,
Never see, but tell
Of cares and woes none asks,
Tales left incomplete—
Drowned out by the din
Of that vast, cold machine
Crushing dreams and lives
To make its cogwheels spin—
Contrived, inhuman scene
Where no grace survives.
The careless eye may see
The sparkling apogee
Of vaunted modern life.
But past the filigree
Lies comic tragedy
Of solitude and strife.
.
.
Nudibranchs
Snails stripped of shells, but just as brilliantly
Endowed with flair of color and design:
Manes bristling, ruffles bunched luxuriantly,
Frail fractal-lace, or slender, sleek streamline.
Living gems patterned, painted vividly—
Black, crimson, turquoise, sapphire, line on line;
Fiery orange, mint-green spots; white clarity;
Lemon, lilac, fuchsia—glow through the brine.
Though all that brilliance squirms upon the muck,
Sucking the ocean’s sludge, doomed to expire
In short days and dissolve into the mire,
It fixes the gaze rapt and wonderstruck,
A masterpiece of an immortal brush
With hues unfading, ever bold and flush.
.
.
Adam Sedia (b. 1984) lives in his native Northwest Indiana and practices law as a civil and appellate litigator. He has published four books of poetry and his poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in various literary journals. He is also a composer, and his musical works may be heard on his YouTube channel.
I’m receiving mixed messages in “Downtown.” In the last stanza, “but” prepares the reader for a refutation of the previous three lines, yet “comic tragedy” points to a future happy ending despite solitude and strife.
“Nudibranchs” is a magical poem that makes me wish I could see a sea-slug in real life.
I’m glad you see a glimmer of hope in “Downtown.” And nudibranchs are indeed one of nature’s hidden gems.
“Downtown” is such a marvelous description of a crowded city, as well as an empathetic and insightful interpretation of the lives of the people in it. I love the similes of an “iron maze” and “a cage”, and the way you’ve used those images to reflect the “cares and woes” of people who, nevertheless, sport mere “blank stares” that never see each other here, “Where no grace survives”.
“Downtown” I first drafted some 15 years ago when I lived in Chicago — near to which I still live and which I still frequent. Even though I should be used to it by now, I always feel dehumanized when I walk though its downtown (which still has many beautiful old buildings in the shade of the glass and steel).
Powerful works: the descriptive flair of Nudibranchs is wonderful and I like the observational insights of Downtown: “The careless eye may see / The sparkling apogee / Of vaunted modern life.” Vaunted indeed!
At least in Europe your human-scaled cities still largely survive intact, as much as your elites are trying to convert them into American-style glass-and-steel forests. Walking through the prison of an American downtown is an utterly dehumanizing experience, as it is almost certainly intended to be.
I loved ‘Downtown’. The imagery is vivid and memorable – ‘towers rise,
Caging the very sky’ / ‘jostling crowds of masks’.
I especially liked the last stanza, expressing the idea that we only look up and see the mighty skyscrapers of a city, not the ground level solitude and strife behind those ‘masks’.
This poem should be on a school teaching syllabus!
Thanks for the reads, Adam.
Thank you! High praise indeed — although I would say let’s put Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth back on syllabi before my poems get there.
“Downtown” is a quintessentially modern poem, though it is not modernist. The description of the ambience of a large metropolis, and the sustained contrast of mammoth edifices with the desperate, ant-like human population beneath them, hearkens back to the dystopian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As I read it, the key phrase is “comic tragedy” — the lives of the denizens of this urban nightmare are frightful for them as individuals, but from a larger perspective they are meaningless and laughable.
I had to look up “nudibranch,” and in doing so I came across a series of pictures of the animals. They really are spectacularly colored. The image of these sea slugs sucking the ocean’s sludge for a very short time, and then “doomed to expire” in a very short time, strikes me as a somewhat recherche metaphor of human existence. If Donne had known about nudibranchs, he would have likely written in the same way about them — all our magnificent human “colors” and “brilliance” and “living gems” are doomed to ephemerality.
“Downtown” is a very personal statement, a summary of how I felt in my years in Chicago, and which I feel and see on the faces every time I return there (for now, weekly). I would like to write more of these “modern, but not modernist” poems.
I will concede that the poem can come off as Donne-ish (which is a compliment I’ll gladly accept), but I wanted also to convey that even this humblest of muck-feeding mollusks can be so vividly beautiful and is part of the world’s wonder that we can sense.
I like the theme of Downtown, It reminds me of William Blake’s London 1802.
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
I did not draw that connection, but I am flattered to have my poetry compared to Blake’s. Thank you.
Twenty years before you were born, Adam, there was a top popular song called “Downtown” (written by Tony Hatch, sung by Petula Clark) celebrating downtown as the vibrant place where the young could find relief for all their cares. Quoting you instead of Hatch and Clark, downtown’s “careless eye” saw the “sparkling apogee of vaunted modern life,” while vision in your first two stanzas is nothing if not impeded. You explain in the third stanza, blaming the lack of an ability to hear on the “din” of the city’s “vast cold machine” creating an “inhuman scene.” I can only wonder if, in your rough dystopian trimeter lines, you answer that bright song or equivalent ideas, and the ultimate failure of such a dream.
“Nudibranchs” offers a vivid contrast, especially in color. Enough will be said by others of these lower animals competing with humans. Your metrical choices, in some lines, conduct by color observed in the nudibranchs:
Fiery ORange, MINT green SPOTS, white CLAriTY,
LEMon, LILac, FUschia
The separation of the subject “brilliance” in line 9 from verb and object “fixes the gaze” in line 12, supplies another opportunity for contrasting the slugs to their surroundings which, though natural, seem somehow as unattractive as “Downtown.” Plus, life in the muck is short. Maybe not a contrast after all–but by whatever interpretation, an appealing contemplative pair of poems from you.
Having grown up with a mother who listened to oldies stations in the early 1990’s, I know the song “Downtown” well and can actually sing some of the lyrics. Hatch and Clark were writing in a different time, before riots, urban blight, and postmodern architecture made cities what they are today. I didn’t have the song in mind, but I think it’s a perfect bookend — a “before” snapshot to my poem’s “after.”
I give credit for the pairing to Evan; both were in a larger group of poems I submitted. But on reflection I agree with your observation: there is a subtle and unexpected appropriateness in these poems’ juxtaposition. I might also add there is also a contrast between the artistry of God and the artifice of man.
“Downtown” is great! I used to work in a city, and it conveys the feeling really well.
One of the things I most admire about the Modernists, painters, architects, composers, poets and prosets, is their willingness to confront the enormous, dynamic urban canvas: in America, poets, like Crane, Eliot, Sandburg, etc. That is one of the most difficult of enterprises for the NewMillennial poet as well. Though I never lived in Chicago, as I have Seattle, LA, and now the Metroplex, I have passed Chicago. Here is a PostModern poem of a few decades past:
Chicago
by “Bad” Weslie Ecru
How eerie it appears—Chicago—looking north.
Faint blue skies are filled with large, violet-edged clouds,
which overhead seem ominous as they go forth,
as if they were some giant’s army’s battle shrouds.
Amidst the gray and orange concrete structures, stands
John Hancock Center, rising high above the crowds.
The dark one-hundred-story obelisk commands
the view, itself within its own Decameron,
an epic tale that dominates skyscrapered lands.
The cam’ra catches glints of Götterdämmerung:
off West—the Willis Tower; at the East—the shore
along Lake Michigan; above—Sun glimmers on.
It’s so unreal–the shining, like El Dorado ore,
broad, golden, shouldered blocks, as hard as boulders, rocks,
or mountains, rivaling the heights of Troy, and more.
Against its massive walls, wind from time’s vast plains knocks.
With mighty constructs, like those found in ancient Rome,
and hues, like those of Florence in the Renaissance,
it houses corporations. Millions call it home.
It is a hub of finance, industry and trade.
At highways, trains, and planes it sits, and on the loam.
With grain it takes, and livestock too, it makes the grade.
With iron ore and coal it also works. It buys and sells,
retails a hundred thousand things that it has made:
tools, processed foods, confections, pharmaceuticals,
accessories and engines for the modern way,
machines, equipment, printed matter, chemicals,
new instruments for media, for health, for play.
In iron gloves and girt with strength, this forceful Thor,
red-bearded, rides time’s goat-drawn car; and every day
it trades on futures, swings Mjollnir for all it’s worth,
and sends its boomeranging thunderbolts across
eternity. From out its crown of hard, square thorns,
what curses, crimes, and macrobats will it not toss?
“Bad” Weslie Ecru is a poet of Chicago.
“Nudibranchs” reminds me of Holmes’ “The Chambered Nautilus”, one the best poems of the early United States of America.