“I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city.”
From “Manhatta” by Walt Whitman
This irony of multitudes in arrays
of desultory immense particulars,
here, there, now amassing in a throng
of different looks, ethnicities, politics,
histories, but one, teaming, ascending,
descending the walks and stairs as denizens,
citizens, souls that have reified from eons
ago, but are bustling now, alive, here, moving
among each other on the stairs and streets
and stations— modern, insouciant
in the crowds, ambling, hurrying, slowing
down in the steady flow of traffic
that blurs in the roll and din of cars
and trucks coming and going with lights
all around and above like so many eyes
staring down from their sockets on wires
and poles, illuminating the world inside
the world at large that extends beyond
its walls and into souls and sky; that stands
for now on this chthonic isle of schist
and marble and earth that forms Manhattan Prong
on which seven million thrive in a medley
of colors, languages, and dreams to a chorus
of honks and whistles and cries around
the clock in a paradox of multitudes
and a single child whose eyes gaze out
from a picture on a wall from inside
an apartment somewhere, lost for now,
but whose likeness there is that of the city’s soul
that is so immense she stands for all,
a child who shines as a cynosure divine,
just there, in a borough that is a “scurvy
and disastrous place” for irony’s sake.
“What I assume you shall assume,” he said
because we must assume in order to see
with eyes that are as large as clouds
if we are to live as one in this place,
to know just what we are thinking and feeling
so differently but also the same because
we are the residents of almighty New York,
both lost and found, passing each other
on the streets and boulevards as strangers
as if we had known each other as brothers
and sisters from the start.
Chard deNiord is the author of nine books of poetry, including, most recently, Westminster West (Tupelo Press, 2025), In My Unknowing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), and One As Other (Green Writers Press, 2024). Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Providence College, he has also published two books of interviews with eminent American poets. Co-founder of the Ruth Stone Foundation and the MFA program in poetry at New England College, he serves as board member of the Sundog Poetry Center in Vermont and is the essay editor at Plume Poetry Journal.