Almost nothing happens in "Waiting", and that is the point. A park sits half-asleep in March, a speaker stands on a hill, and the neighbourhoods go on sounding around them. Orrin Schwab builds the whole poem from this suspended moment. Waiting is its mood, its subject and, by the end, its way of understanding time.
The form acts out the title. There are no full stops anywhere and only two commas, so the sentences drift rather than close. The line breaks fall on small, unstressed words: "to cure the grass of / its shyness", "to clear the paths through / the woods". The reader's voice hangs at the end of each line, expecting something that arrives a moment late. The opening sentence works the same way. Its verb, "waits", comes early, but what the park waits *for* is stacked up behind it: the sun, then the city's workers. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The sound is held together by soft, slow vowels ("soft green", "serene and gentle") and by the repeated "gentle" in the first two stanzas, which gives the early part of the poem a hush.
The imagery starts with personification. The sun will "cure the grass of its shyness", which makes the lawn a timid child and the spring light a healer. The brownstones are "sage", a colour but also a word for wisdom, and at night they become "figures" standing against the silence, as if the buildings were watchful elders. The third stanza is the plainest, almost like a plaque on a wall: "a noble borough / built four generations ago", full of "now restored" brick and stone. The word "restored" quietly echoes the park's own wait for renewal. The place has been repaired before and expects to be again.
The fourth stanza is the poem's centre. The old neighbourhoods "breathe ethnicity", and the park "carries the souls of / people who spoke a hundred languages". Here the park stops being scenery and becomes a vessel for people. The repeated "all" ("all shades", "all religions and all classes") makes a list that gathers people in rather than sorting them. Then comes the poem's one sharp turn: these people were "divided in life but / blended in the trenches of memory". "Trenches" is a hard word in such a gentle poem. Judging by the imagery, it suggests hardship, digging in, perhaps even graves. Memory is where the divisions finally dissolve, and it is dug out of difficulty, not given freely.
Only in the fifth stanza does "I" appear, and the poem moves from night to "this morning". The speaker places himself beside the trees: "the woods stand as I do / sparse and clean". Bare winter branches and a stripped-down, uncluttered self are the same thing, and both are waiting for leaves. From the hill, the buildings "shape the sky", and the blue seems to "rest" on them. The city is not set against nature here but frames it.
The last stanza shifts from seeing to hearing, and the sound is "slow drums". The simile is inventive because drums keep time. The neighbourhoods are "working on time / both mine and theirs". The phrase can be read as keeping the beat, or as labouring through the hours, and "both mine and theirs" refuses to separate the speaker's time from that of the crowd of past and present residents. Waiting, then, is not idleness. It is what a place and a person do together while something slowly turns.
The poem is worth reading because it takes a form we usually associate with the countryside, the quiet seasonal nature poem, and sets it in a Brooklyn park ringed by apartment blocks. It treats immigration and diversity without slogans, as a layer of memory under the grass. It also lets its speaker be small. He is not a hero or a prophet, just a person on a hill listening to the drums of other people's lives. That modesty is what gives the poem its steady, convincing calm.