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September 4, 2021

The Office Building

Helen Hoyt

We kissed there in the stone entrance,
In the great cool stone mouth of the building,
Before it took you.
We kissed under the granite arches.
And then you turned and were gone
And high about and above were the hard towered walls,
The terrible weights of stone, relentless,
But for the moment they had been kind to us,
Folding us with arms
While we kissed.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 4, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“The Office Building” appeared in The Liberator, issue 10 (1918).

Helen Hoyt was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1887 and received her AB from Barnard College in 1909. She worked as the associate editor of Poetry magazine and authored several poetry collections, including Poems of Amis (R. J. Hoffmann, 1946), The Name of a Rose (Helen Gentry, 1931), Leaves of Wild Grape (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929), and Apples Here in My Basket (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1924). She died in Saint Helena, California, in 1972.

The Liberator
(December, 1918)

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Thanks to Rosa Alcalá, author of MyOTHER TONGUE (Futurepoem, 2017), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Listen to a Q&A about Alcalá’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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Poem-a-Day - "The Office Building" by Helen Hoyt

The Office Building

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