(no subject)

[theratmanknows.livejournal.com]

hi all, i'm looking for poems about cities or urban experiences, preferably appropriate for middle schoolers.

in exchange, here's Urban Renewal, by Yusef Komunyakaa


The sun slides down behind brick dust,
today’s angle of life. Everything

melts, even when backbones
are I-beams braced for impact.

Sequential sledgehammers fall, stone
shaped into dry air

white soundsystem of loose metal
under every footstep. Wrecking crews,

men unable to catch sparrows without breaking
wings into splinters. Blues-horn

mercy. Bloodlines. Nothing
but the white odor of absence.

The big iron ball
swings, keeping time

to pigeons cooing in eaves
as black feathers

float on to blueprint
parking lots.

Comments

[rawr-balrog.livejournal.com]

"The City In Which I Loved You - Li-Young Lee (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-city-in-which-i-loved-you/)

The obvious reply, I know.

VI (from Midsummer) | Derek Walcott

[wind-hover.livejournal.com]

Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat's yawn,
Trees with dust on their lips, cars melting down
in its furnace. Heat staggers the drifting mongrels.
The capitol has been repainted rose, the rails
round Woodford Square the color of rusting blood.
Casa Rosada, the Argentinian mood,
croons from the balcony. Monotonous lurid bushes
brush the damp clouds with the ideograms of buzzards
over the Chinese groceries. The oven alleys stifle.
In Belmont, mournful tailors peer over old machines,
stitching June and July together seamlessly.
And one waits for midsummer lightning as the armed sentry
in boredom waits for the crack of a rifle.
But I feed on its dust, its ordinariness,
on the faith that fills its exiles with horror,
on the hills at dusk with their dusty orange lights,
even on the pilot light in the reeking harbour
that turns like a police car's. The terror
is local, at least. Like the magnolia's whorish whiff.
All night, the barks of a revolution crying wolf.
The moon shines like a lost button.
The yellow sodium lights on the wharf come on.
In streets, dishes clatter behind dim windows.
The night is companionable, the future as fierce as
tomorrow's sun everywhere. I can understand
Borges's blind love for Buenos Aires,
how a man feels the streets of a city swell in his hand.

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

More appropriate for older audiences is Anne Sexton's Mr. Mine (http://www.abm-enterprises.net/sextonfourteen.html) (skim to #11).