Window Lights from Howell Mill to the AUC

Lyrics

November again. 
Corner of Howell Mill and 18th.
The blue of the sky is deepening, turning to slate.
And then the first one.
A window square, high up, turns gold.
Then another. And another.

Up here, it’s all new glass and raw steel beams.
The cranes just went quiet last month.
These lofts were warehouses for the King Plow, where they broke down cotton gins and shipped them south.
Now it's a six-hundred-dollar Edison bulb hanging over a polished concrete floor.
A life arranged just so, perfectly framed.
A silent story behind a sheet of cold, clean light.
It's 7:45 PM.
The whole reinvention, all the new money, clicking on for the night.

And I trace the line your lights make tonight.
A string of pearls thrown south into the dark.
From the new construction to the old foundation.
One city, holding two remarks.
This Westside, a constellation on the ground.

My eyes follow the glow, past the stadium's soft, sleeping curve.
Down to the cluster on the hill.
The older lamps.
The ones that have been burning steady since 1867.
I can almost pick out a light in Graves Hall.
A curtain half-drawn in a Spelman dorm, founded 1881.
Someone is reading Du Bois.
Someone is writing the future with a number two pencil under a cheap desk lamp.
That light is a different kind of furnace.
It forges a different kind of steel.

And I trace the line your lights make tonight.
A string of pearls thrown south into the dark.
From the new construction to the old foundation.
One city, holding two remarks.
This Westside, a constellation on the ground.

The CSX yard is breathing in the cool sixty-five degree air.
The BeltLine is a quiet black ribbon, stitching the dark patches together.
The stadium, born just yesterday in 2017, hums with a sleeping power grid.
And all of it… all of it is held in this single gaze from a single street corner.
From the steel mill’s ghost under the IKEA to the scholar’s promise.
The sodium vapor orange of the old city grid meets the warm, white gold of the new lofts.

From Howell Mill to Westview Drive.
From the tasting menu to the dining hall.
It's all one sentence.
It's all one light.
Goodnight, Westside.
You hold it all.
You hold it so tight.