Summer City

Never have we had it so hot.
The children turn on hydrants
and the gutters run with sweat and garbage
and blood from the stupid sullen
so-called law that is only brutes
who feel the heat, too, I suppose,
and suffer as we, being, like us, flesh.
In the dark rats run over comfortless beds
and vermin crawl across the kitchen tables
and both come out on the street
and talk hate, stirring us up
like the putrid breeze
and anger begins to stir in our sluggish veins
and so we hate. We hate and are hungry for blood.
Never have we had it so hot.
One night a man came, stinking with sweat
like the rest of us, but different,
appearing, it seemed, from nowhere,
not out of the woodwork like the others.
So, for nothing better to do, we followed him
up three flights of urine-stinking stairs
to a room hot with many lights
and bodies crowded too close together.
I found no place to sit
but by then I was curious
and what else was there to do?
I climbed over steaming bodies
and found a seat on a paint-peeling sill
of an open window. He’d been talking awhile,
the man. I came in the middle
like walking into a movie and trying to guess
what must have gone on in the beginning
and missing things because of not knowing
what went on before. Why did I stay to listen?
He was ugly and I couldn’t figure out his angle.
He talked about some other man he loved
and when I jeered somebody said: shut up.
So I just stayed there in the open window.
I was tired and groggy from heat, and so I fell,
first asleep, and then, as he was long talking,
right out the sooty window, three floors down
onto the street. Well, it killed me:
I’m not kidding. I was dead. Then this man
rushed down the stairs, they tell me,
and they were crowding around me and shouting
and someone said call an ambulance,
and someone else (wanting a fight) said call the cops
and this man pushed his way through the mob
and flung himself on me and held me in his arms
close and warm, and told them not to worry
(though nobody gave a damn, it was just
something to get noisy about).
Then I sat up as though I had been asleep
and all I felt was hungry
so I walked back up those three putrid flights
of stairs and someone found some bread and cheese
and I ate, and drank some wine
and someone talked about the other men, the one
I’d jeered about, and then another guy called Lazarus,
and I didn’t understand. I only knew
there was a difference in the room and if we went
back on the streets on stifling nights and listened
to the screams of hate and kill
there’d be no answering fury in my blood.
There was another way somewhere for me to find,
and this squat, ugly man,
talking amidst the filth, was showing me
although I didn’t understand.
We talked a long while, even till break of day,
and then he went. And I was made alive
and not a little comforted.

Janet Pedersen, Boy Painting, 2018, oil on canvas. Used by permission.

Read the story of Eutychus in Acts 20:7–12.

Source: “Summer City” from The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L’engle by Madeleine L’Engle, copyright © 2005 by Crosswicks, Ltd. Used by permission of WaterBrook Multnomah, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.