Orrin Schwab's "Waiting" pictures a Brooklyn park in March, still quiet and a little bare, as it waits for the sun to warm the grass and for the city to clear its paths. The speaker seems to be standing on a hill in the morning, looking out over the brownstones, houses and apartment buildings around it.
What begins as a description of a park slowly becomes a portrait of the neighborhood and its people. The speaker imagines the park carrying the "souls" of earlier residents who spoke "a hundred languages," people divided in life but "blended" in memory. The mood is calm, reflective and affectionate, with a quiet pride in the borough's mixed history.
The woods, "sparse and clean," are compared to the speaker himself, which suggests he is also in a waiting, thoughtful state. The ending adds a gentle sense of time: the neighborhoods sound like "slow drums," keeping a rhythm that belongs both to the speaker and to everyone who came before him.