I would return to you in a jacket of gold leaves 
drawn tight
against the city wind 
whipping around corners through button holes over 
cobbled streets park lanes 
cordoned-off barbarian herds 
of steel and glass and concrete ground zero for crowds 
of absence. We’d lift off beyond the brick 
toward choked stars, moons outshined by neon 
and by anxious day, moons perched on dark spires 
golden lions
we’d wrap our naïve wings around 
to embrace the artifice of it all 
and the reality: the heat here is unbearable 
and I miss the need to be warm, that need to look 
forward to nights alone with you with no morning on our minds 
no time 
no need to claw through 
restaurants packed with bridge and tunnel drunk 
on the filth and the beauty. 
For here
there is no comparison 
no autumn as autumn no snow to justify 
a hot drink or a fat meal the fish is delicious 
and the beer even better but not the same. 
Some say the grass
is greener as if it’s law 
and more
that I try to recreate 
metropolis each time a baobab drops a beetle 
to flee every time winter floods the sand 
to mute the night—
boats eclipsing the mainland sprawl 
trading with another language transformed before my ears: 
tell me how you lived
your dream and I will tell you who you are 
every night, every single night and with a wingspan 
I resurrect in a cold sweat 
and off in the distance 
there are drums
drums beating the island

Copyright © 2024 by Adam Wiedewitsch. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 1, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Around the time I was writing ‘If Night You Were a City,’ I was trying to learn French by reading The Little Prince. I quote from Fady Joudah’s translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden.”
—Adam Wiedewitsch