Seeming to resist attempts
to bring it to the ground,
as if former tenants,
brokers in wheat and oat,
their secretaries hemmed skirts beaming
swung in support from the girders.

The wrecking crew laid all round it in ambush,
a group of firemen and a reporter complained,

It had grown too late for sport or the late news.
They cursed it was far too late for supper.

In a circle up the street a crowd gathered.
Square dancers returning from a convention.
They sang as they approached:

"Where are my little girls
pretty as flowers?"

They began to laugh and sing as they saw
the humble steel frame stand defiant.

"Pretty as flowers," they mocked.

The crane gave its huzzah
hoisting cables wrenched tight.
The night smelled holy for the summer
dreams carnage to come.

But the building stood forth
in honor of its builder
as the crowd pulled tight
The scream of the cables grew more fierce.

The dancers thought they saw
the brickless building and its tenants
take their first look ever northward.
They had never seen the shaping river
by the still persistent city.
Their Papa said,

"It's pretty as flowers."

We watched two boys, they were partners.
Papa said they looked like weeds
One prickly, one fine
But we could not tell which he meant.

They stood as T-square to our circle.
They stood and did not move to safety
to the concrete pots with the seedlings on the walk.

They must've thought they could see
it see itself or hear it hiss as it turned
in a full-circle of agony on the crowd.

Steel began to buckle under moonlight
and the crew made plans for the site

One boy pulled the other away
who struggled, clinging.

Shivering with extreme pressure
and the building itself moaning after him
He thought he heard it whisper a curse
(Papa said so too)
at the boy and the leaves just grown to fulness,
to the crowd and the smell of the June night
whose knowledge was not fruition,

"You will profit only
the ripeness of an acorn."