Baron Wormser

Dickensian

Amid the shifty doings of the sooty, choking city
sat — unconcerned yet ministering —
the fairy tale of Boundless Kindness.

It did not fit. It never did and never would.
All the more vain reason to
believe it, to fatefully clutch hope,

vouchsafe love, and find amid (always “amid,”
the crucial, urban word) gentle actions
that spoke persuasively to the power beyond

avarice, hypocrisy, double-dealing, conceit, jealousy,
fear, condescension, contempt, self-pity.
Ah! The list is extensive, trailing around

one street corner and onto another, more or less
like the never-ending city, multiplying troubles
and plots furiously while the inhabitants go about

their character-abetting business, possessed of quirks
that declare the proprietors crookedly human —
the only way to be human, actually, though each

variously battered soul declaimed (words, words, words) his
or her partial view of the coming-and-going
enormity, the sentences, oaths, exclamations

bubbling up from the shallows and depths of
their ragged perspicacity and almost
blessing the stifling meanness the author

so faithfully engaged, saluted, winked at, wrung
out and in the last installment amid deaths,