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The village has come to the city.
In the narrow street, in the crowd
pressing down it, in the faces of tall buildings
we plainly see the shimmer of poplars
in the emptiness of the plateau, the huddle
of houses from which the voices of families,
and tribes before them, rise, reaching across
the sharp ridges of their displacement
to settle like smoke in the deepest hollows
of the city. They are very near to us, in the store
or the next apartment, in the shadow of the tower
yet are heard as distance, as ignorance,
and, in their echoes, the city seems to shudder
like something imagined from very far away;
glass city for those without windows. Their shoes
sit at the doorways as if begging for admission.

"To the City" ~~ John Ash