What do you think?
Rate this book
Metropolis
Metropolis is a visionary work that dreams the elegiac landscape of cities like Toronto, where genteel Victorian culture leans hard against Sri Lankan ghettos; where prostitutes and cocaine dealers ply their trade next to green streets immaculate with rose gardens. In Metropolis, urban portraits of violence, grief, mourning, and joy are underscored by philosophical, historical, and theological concerns. Rishma Dunlop has a gift for looking at cities in all their contradictory beauty and reading the scars of history as the graffiti of everyday life.
58 pages, Paperback
First published October 7, 2005
6 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 28, 2022
Saturday morning. You gift me with
the newspaper in bed.
I read of the capital city of Slovenia
called Ljubljana, meaning Beloved.
There they claim poetry as a national disease.
A love city, province of tenderness where they
too have known the thorn of love.
And here you are - your shoulder
propping up the ruined world.
Under the covers, our bodies practice
living as if our city was on fire.
My hands cover you with poems
that assume another life
unbroken.
In our bed ribboned with newsprint
the world is thick with longing.
We put it to our lips and drink.
Your heart in my skull
my mouth thickens pear sweet.
* * *
Damaged hydrangeas
in your hands.
I save you once.
You should remember me.
Listen,
someone has been calling my name
all this time.
Darkness, darkness
Be my pillow
Hush little baby
Don't say a word
Papa's gonna buy you
a mockingbird.
What did you think mercy looked like?
* * *
In the city where I live
A man is arrested for abducting and
Butchering a twelve-year-old girl.
Tonight it rains and I walk
On streets that reek
Of rust and pitch.
Petitions to any god are uncertain.
The sky is spread with vast wings of lead.
No oracular assurance from the pulpits.
Still I pray
Words coming like blood on the mouth.
That the sweet taste be taken from the violent thought
That in the birdless hours
The mother and father of the twelve-year-old girl
Will be granted dreamless sleep
That the lachrymal salt of this rain
Will become original milk.
the newspaper in bed.
I read of the capital city of Slovenia
called Ljubljana, meaning Beloved.
There they claim poetry as a national disease.
A love city, province of tenderness where they
too have known the thorn of love.
And here you are - your shoulder
propping up the ruined world.
Under the covers, our bodies practice
living as if our city was on fire.
My hands cover you with poems
that assume another life
unbroken.
In our bed ribboned with newsprint
the world is thick with longing.
We put it to our lips and drink.
Your heart in my skull
my mouth thickens pear sweet.
- Still Life, pg. 14
* * *
Damaged hydrangeas
in your hands.
I save you once.
You should remember me.
Listen,
someone has been calling my name
all this time.
Darkness, darkness
Be my pillow
Hush little baby
Don't say a word
Papa's gonna buy you
a mockingbird.
What did you think mercy looked like?
- Sanctum, pg. 25
* * *
In the city where I live
A man is arrested for abducting and
Butchering a twelve-year-old girl.
Tonight it rains and I walk
On streets that reek
Of rust and pitch.
Petitions to any god are uncertain.
The sky is spread with vast wings of lead.
No oracular assurance from the pulpits.
Still I pray
Words coming like blood on the mouth.
That the sweet taste be taken from the violent thought
That in the birdless hours
The mother and father of the twelve-year-old girl
Will be granted dreamless sleep
That the lachrymal salt of this rain
Will become original milk.
- Psalm, pg. 39
Displaying 1 of 1 review