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Flashlights

Chapter 2: I CITY SKETCHES
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About This Book

A compact collection of lyric sketches, reflective poems, and stories in verse that illuminate fleeting moments of urban and domestic life. Through vignette-style pieces the author observes barbershops, cafés, and crowded public spaces, probing loneliness, social exchange, and quiet moral dilemmas. Other poems turn inward to meditate on longing, rest, and mortality, sometimes adopting epistolary or conversational forms. A concluding section offers narrative metres that compress human interactions into sharp dramatic scenes. Spare language, sensory detail, and shifts between irony and tenderness bind the sections into a mosaic of early twentieth-century moods and manners.

I
CITY SKETCHES

Go forth now, moods and metres,
Sing your song and tell your story;
You have companioned me
Through hours grave and gay,
What will you say
To him whose curious hand
Shall turn these pages?
Soon all my joy in setting forth
My vagrant thoughts
Shall pass
Into the silence;
Soon I shall be
One with the mystery.
My book upon some quiet shelf
Beneath your touch
Shall wake, perhaps,
And speak again
My wonder, my delight,
My questioning before the night—
And as you read
Somewhere afar
I shall be singing, singing.