Today's Poem - Friday

I just realized that the last three (also the only three) Poems of the Day are all New England poetesses, so I thought I should branch out for Today's Poem. I was also thinking that so far these are all poems I already know and love, and that it would be nice to find a poem not only new to the girls but also new for me, too.

I hunted around a bit and found one that I think will be perfect, DH Lawrence's Suburbs on a Hazy Day. It makes the suburbs sound like the boring cesspools they are, which is perfect because lately Magpie has been campaigning that she wants to live in the 'burbs (because a lot of her friends have moved there and in her four-year-old world "the suburbs" are probably imagined as some purple-hued pony pastured magic play land) and this poem should paint the more realistic cookie-cutter wasteland which would await her there in reality. (Spoiler alert: a year later we do move to the suburbs. Lucky us!)

Suburbs on a Hazy Day

O stiffly shapen houses that change not,
What conjuror’s cloth was thrown across you, and raised
To show you thus transfigured, changed,
Your stuff all gone, your menace almost rased?

Such resolute shapes, so harshly set
In hollow blocks and cubes deformed, and heaped
In void and null profusion, how is this?
In what strong aqua regia now are you steeped?

That you lose the brick-stuff out of you
And hover like a presentment, fading faint
And vanquished, evaporate away
To leave but only the merest possible taint!