Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

HUMMING and creaking, the car down the street

Lumbered and lurched through thunderous gloam,

Bearing us, spent and dumb with the heat,

From office and counter and factory home:

Sallow-faced clerks, genteel in black;

Girls from the laundries, draggled and dank;

Ruddy-faced laborers slouching slack;

A broken actor, grizzled and lank;

A mother with querulous babe on her lap;

A schoolboy whistling under his breath;

An old man crouched in a dreamless nap;

A widow with eyes on the eyes of death;

A priest; a sailor with deep-sea gaze;

A soldier in scarlet with waxed moustache;

A drunken trollop in velvet and lace;

All silent in that tense dusk …. when a flash

Of lightning shivered the sultry gloom:

With shattering brattle the whole sky fell

About us, and rapt to a dazzling doom

We glided on in a timeless spell,

Unscathed through deluge and flying fire

In a magical chariot of streaming glass,

Cut off from our kind and the world’s desire,

Made one by the awe that had come to pass.