THE PLAYGROUND
The city street, the city street,
Lies heavy on the town—
An awful avenue of heat,
Whose rays of yellow Summer beat
Upon the stones of brown,
Where little children’s weary feet
Creep slowly up and down.
The houses rise, the houses rise,
Beside the thoroughfare;
Their windows look with bloodshot eyes
O’er huddled roofs to smoky skies,
And find no promise there;
And childhood’s voice of laughter dies
In pestilential air.
The city great, the city great—
It is so big a thing!
From city gate to city gate,
From somber dawn to even late,
It throbs with marketing;
It has no moment it may wait
To hear the children sing.
The little ones, the little ones,
The buds that never bloom,
(While underneath the breathless suns
The stream of life forever runs
Through arteries of gloom),
Look on your stately Parthenons
And find so little room!
There is a street, another street,
Beyond the city’s wall,
Beyond the corridors of heat,
Where waters pure and waters sweet
In crystal cadence fall—
And to the children’s tiny feet
Their liquid measures call!
Its tenements, its tenements,
Are neither grim nor gray;
And from each verdant eminence
Their crimson-throated residents
Pour music to the day,
Their choristing inhabitants
Sing loud a roundelay.
O fairy shores, O merry shores,
Away from slime and sin!—
With leafy roofs and grassy floors,
Where robin nests and swallow soars
When Summer days begin—
Oh, let us open wide the doors
And ask the children in!