Most poems about city life either celebrate the energy or mourn the loneliness. "All of this is temporary," by the writer who goes by wordsforghosts, does something quieter and more useful. It begins with a person drowning in crowds and ends with that same person lying on the grass, looking up. The central idea is that the feeling of being insignificant, which the city makes crushing, can become a relief once you find something far bigger and older than the city to measure yourself against.
The opening sets up the problem through a handful of precise choices. "The City" is capitalised, as if it were a creature, and it "swells with life" like a wave or a lung. Against it stands "you," and the word "insignificant" gets a line to itself, so the page shows how small the person feels. The poem then turns to a sea image: "Overwhelmed by / the tide, so an anchor is made." The colon that follows leads to a blunt, joyless rule: "One must stay busy." The impersonal "One" sounds like something recited, not felt. It is an anchor made of routine, and there is a quiet irony in it, because busyness is exactly the "mundane purpose" the speaker has just been watching with dismay.
The middle of the poem is its most visual stretch. Smoke "dances" in the rain, which is a small flash of beauty, but it is "framed" by "sickly-white, luminescent light." Those adjectives pull against each other, since "luminescent" sounds glowing while "sickly" sounds ill. The city's night is bright but unwell, and the word "framed" suggests even the dancing smoke is boxed in. The walk "between night & day" adds to this. The speaker is awake in a gap between two states, among "always the same shapes." The repeated shapes give the sense of a loop with no exit.
The turn comes when the buildings seem to speak. They are "trying to say something... / more than their designer or / creators ever intended." This is the poem's most original thought: places pick up meanings beyond the purposes they were built for. What follows is the only "I" in the poem, and it admits defeat: "I don't know what it is / any more than they do." The speaker and the buildings are equally unable to say what they mean. That honesty keeps the poem from sounding like advice handed down from above.
The ending shifts the whole direction of the poem. After the cold "One must stay busy," we get a gentler instruction: "find nearest breath of green / & living things." The word "breath" answers the earlier sense of drowning. Then the body is told what to do: "tilt your head back, / lay down upon the grass." The speaker has spent the poem staring at buildings and people on a horizontal line, and now the gaze lifts. The final phrase, "the immense & ancient darkness of // the sky…", is broken across a gap of white space, so the reader's eye drops and then rises, much as a head tilts back. The ellipsis leaves the thought open, like the sky itself. "Ancient" is the key word, because it quietly answers the title. Beside something that old, the city, its worries and the self are all temporary. The darkness here is also different from the city's night. It is real darkness, not a sickly glow.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and lines of uneven length. Short, clipped phrases in the first half mimic the city's rush, while the last stanza stretches and slows. The ampersands are a good example of a small choice doing real work. They keep the pace hurried and contemporary, like shorthand typed on the move.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to oversell. It does not claim nature cures anything, and it admits it cannot decode the city. It only suggests that the same insignificance that frightens you among buildings can feel like freedom under the stars. For a young reader, that is a surprisingly practical thought. Feeling small is not always a problem to fix, and sometimes it depends on what you are comparing yourself to.