'Hotel Room, 12th Floor' - poem - Norman MacCaig


Hotel Room, 12th Floor

 

This morning I watched from here

a helicopter skirting like a damaged insect

the Empire State Building, that

jumbo sized dentist’s drill, and landing

5          on the roof of the Pan Am skyscraper.

But now midnight has come in

from foreign places. Its uncivilised darkness

is shot at by a million lit windows, all

ups and acrosses.

 

10        But midnight is not so easily defeated.

I lie in bed, between

a radio and a television set, and hear

the wildest of warwhoops continually ululating

through the glittering canyons and gulches –

15        police cars and ambulances racing

to the broken bones, the harsh screaming

from coldwater flats, the blood

glazed on sidewalks.

 

The frontier is never

20        somewhere else. And no stockades

can keep the midnight out.

 

Norman MacCaig

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