by Lawrence Kessenich
I hear the music of seven languages
on a four-block stretch of Harvard Square,
see the copper glow of the Hancock
Tower at sunset, feel the familiar
bump of cobblestones under my feet.
Mark Twain said people in New York ask
“How much is he worth?” while Bostonians
ask “How much does he know?” That burning
desire to discover keeps the city humming,
yet we’re grounded in history, too,
still treading on sidewalks made of
baked clay. I stand
one night on Beacon Hill, gaze up at the
few stars city lights allow to shine,
feel myself stretched between past and future
the pull of the earth on which
our forefathers stood, the pull of the moon,
which they could not have dreamed their descendants
would visit. Or perhaps they did.
One historian reports that
“there were books on Beacon Hill while wolves
still howled from the summit.” Perhaps some
Englishman closed his book one night and stood
where I stand, dreaming of what we’ve become.
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