A HYMN TO NIGHT
Come, mysterious night;
Descend and nestle to us.

Descend softly on the houses
We built with pride,
Without worship.
Fold them in your veil,
Spill your shadows.

Come over our stores and factories,
Hide our pride-our shame
With your nebulous wings.

Come down on our cobbled streets:
Unleash your airy hounds.
Come to the sleepers, night;
Light in them your fires.


Max Michelson 
1916


POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
1918

A LADY TALKING TO A POET
For a moment you felt nude and shivered.
Your social position hung near;
You threw it about you
A garment frail and lacy.

THE GOLDEN APPLE
Running to art-exhibitions, to concerts and to the poor in
the tenements,
With eyes held high up as a cloud, and as soft, as haunting,
She stopped to pick up
The golden, apple-shapedistiller.

A DILETTANTE
Tall, delicately-stout,
With "turned," wine-moist moustache,
He spoke like some bragging, spoiled school-boy:
"Art is its own reward."

THE TRAITOR
He knew the lady's half-mocking, half-regretful smile,
Fluttering like one of the sweet-pea petals

DEATH
One comes to me every day
Gentle, tactful, and of
Admirable dignity.
He is friendly though not wheedling,
He wants me to know him.
Sometimes he touches my arm,
Or even presses it impulsively.

TO A WOMAN ASLEEP IN A STREET-CAR
Woman sleeping in the car
Strange, aloof and far
Shall I shake you and tell you
Who you are?

Wake up and let us speak
Till our hearts are bared to the core,
Till we are a man and a woman no more,
Till we are empty like vases that leak,
Till we droop and fall,
Till we are nothing at all.


Max Michelson

Michelson was a childhood immigrant to America from Lithuania and settled in Chicago, working as a furrier. Later, in 1920 he moved to Seattle, 'soon after his arrival there, a mental hospital had to be his refuge' and there he was to stay until he died, in obscurity, in 1953.