The Population Poem by Peter Campion

One of the feelings which returns so often:
I mean the way that winter afternoons
call back those childhood sulks at the window.
That incessant need to sketch in the people

behind the lichened shingle of facing houses.
Now, when evening gathers, the walls conceal

no lion tamers lounging with the lions,
no divers plunging inside an aquarium.
Just a catch in the stomach like falling:
sweet emptiness . . . which others must also feel.

Even hours after, mothers and children
crossing the bright street by the supermarket
cut such vivid profiles. And they have a fierceness:
like ravenous hummingbirds who couldn't care

about the thorns they thrust through to devour
the little beads of honey in the flower.
Or like themselves . . . Lucent apartments shelve
into the hills, the whole volume of sky

falls on the spaces between, and passing strangers
move with the urgency that darkness
lends them: their skins much brighter against the expanse
of towers, suburbs, and fields they pull behind.