This is a day when truths will out, perhaps; <br />leak from the dangling telephone earphones <br />sapping the festooned switchboards' strength; <br />fall from the windows, blow from off the sills, <br />—the vague, slight unremarkable contents <br />of emptying ash-trays; rub off on our fingers <br />like ink from the un-proof-read newspapers, <br />crocking the way the unfocused photographs <br />of crooked faces do that soil our coats, <br />our tropical-weight coats, like slapped-at moths. <br /> <br />Today's a day when those who work <br />are idling. Those who played must work <br />and hurry, too, to get it done, <br />with little dignity or none. <br />The newspapers are sold; the kiosk shutters <br />crash down. But anyway, in the night <br />the headlines wrote themselves, see, on the streets <br />and sidewalks everywhere; a sediment's splashed <br />even to the first floors of apartment houses. <br /> <br />This is a day that's beautiful as well, <br />and warm and clear. At seven o'clock I saw <br />the dogs being walked along the famous beach <br />as usual, in a shiny gray-green dawn, <br />leaving their paw prints draining in the wet. <br />The line of breakers was steady and the pinkish, <br />segmented rainbow steadily hung above it. <br />At eight two little boys were flying kites.<br /><br />Elizabeth Bishop<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/suicide-of-a-moderate-dictator/
