COPLEY SQUARE WINTER

Terry Downes

The wind blew low and mournful cold
Across the heating grate
The granite building shielding him
He prayed from cruelest fate.

Across the square the grand hotel
Drew rev’lers by the score,
Who passing barely noticed him
Collapsed at Reaper’s door.

His stomach ached for warming food
To help him wage the fight
To cheat the summons claiming him
For death’s roll call that night.

While under gleaming chandeliers
Guests ate and drank their fill
Of New Year’s lavish offerings,
Immune from winter’s chill.

Aroma drifted out the door
Towards him across the street
A friendless being, cold and sick,
Wrapped thin in tattered sheet.

From steeple near the hour boomed
Midnight’s count struck slow,
Every tolling counting down
A spirit ebbing low.

Until at dawn two trucks appeared
One carried food that day,
The second paused aside the grate
And hauled a corpse away.

****

Terry Downes is an attorney and retired District Court Clerk/Magistrate who went on to found and direct the MCC Program on Homeland Security, and long served as an adjunct professor at Suffolk Univ. Law School and UMASS-Lowell. He lives in Lowell with his wife Atty. Annie O’Connor.

He explained that this poem tries to capture a haunting scene he witnessed one bitterly cold and windy December night in the mid-1990s while attending an event at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square. When he arrived, he noticed a group of homeless people under blankets on top of the heating grates behind the library. When he left the library several hours later, the individuals were still there. He included the poem in his 1996 chapbook When Winter Takes A Stroll: Reflections on Life & Baseball. Our present arctic weather made it seem relevant today.