Humming and creaking, the car down the street
Lumbered and lurched through thunderous gloam,
Bearing us, spent and dumb with the heat,
From office and counter and factory home —

Sallow-faced clerks, genteel in black;
Girls from the laundries, draggled and dank;
Ruddy-faced labourers slouching slack;
A broken actor, grizzled and lank;

A mother with querulous babe on her lap;
A schoolboy whistling under his breath;
An old man crouched in a dreamless nap;
A widow with eyes on the eyes of death;

A priest; a sailor with deep-sea gaze;
A soldier in scarlet with waxed moustache;
A drunken trollop in velvet and lace —
All silent in that tense hush ... when a flash

Of lightning shivered the sultry gloom:
With shattering brattle the whole sky fell
About us — and, rapt to a dazzling doom,
We glided on in a timeless spell

Unscathed through deluge and flying fire
In a magical chariot of streaming glass,
Cut off from our kind and the world's desire,
Made one by the awe that had come to pass.