Yet the authority of the voice interrupts itself. First the people “cling and whisper together as children” but then the voice says: “no, never as children.” The simultaneous innocence of children is precluded or occluded, as the images suggested, by the social conditions destabilizing their lives. The statement that “no journalist” suggests the discrepancies between press coverage of white and black criminality that Mumford describes.^[33]

The “mingling and commingling” of the lovers above reappear in the guise of “sisters’ voices in chapels”; it is an ambiguous phrase which suggests black women in revivalist urban storefront churches rather than Roman Catholic nuns.

The bridge’s iron mesh also reappears and the psychic distance is refocused locally, behind a girl’s knee. She returns to her memory of the 1950s childhood, when public hydrants are opened so children can play in the water. But the “doused smell of charred buildings” shows an inundated fire department left with the task of putting out the burned buildings after the riot. Yet the poem leaves the charred buildings and pivots to the summer of 1967, itself connected the memory of the earlier summertime.

Gershwin’s song from “Porgy and Bess”^[34] reintroduces the images of “shadow and pale” from the first stanza as the voice of the lover from earlier in the poem says: “too hot to sleep, Hush baby, come to papa” again as the figures board the windows. The term “citizens” restates the civic indictment the government made against Newark’s citizens, who were consistently blamed, as in the South Bronx in the subsequent decade, for burning their own communities.

The enjambment between “points of flame” and “within their eyes” sends the reader’s gaze to the iris of the lovers who leave via the fire escape, but also “must look away,” since the burden of communal responsibility cannot be necessarily completely borne by victims or perpetrators. The final abstractions of the singing terror and pity arrive through women “bending through smoke,” as if they are transforming themselves, in the style of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to escape what they must witness.