O New York, this night let me hear you sing, and just to pass the time,
Please tell, which center of the world were you in another life?
Were you Rome? Where Galicians, Iberians, Saxons roamed, and hated each other at first, but knew in time
That the name of Rome was greater than all those of their smaller tribes,
And so, came together, and in doing so, gave up all their petty hubris and pride?
Were you New Istanbul, old Constanipole? Where Turks and Arabs and Europeans each came and left their mark?
Remaking that same sepulcher of divine wisdom into a barracks, then a church, and then a mosque?
Or were you Cochin, on India's Malabar Coast? Where to this day, upon a single street,
You can find the temples and homes of thousands of old refugees?
Syriac, Catholic, Methodist Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Parsis?
Were you Alexandria? Where Greeks, Judeans, and Egyptians came and each other's songs all sung?
And translated all of each other's greatest works into Koine, the common tongue?
Whose core, undoubted, from Macedonia came, but who, by loanwords from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Egyptian-soon-to-be-Coptic, was kept young?
Were you Nishapur, where Chinese and Indian merchants stopped, and sold their wares, along that road paved with silk?
So many that girls in Iran a thousand years later, to be named "Beautiful," are still named Hind?
Because all they knew of the people that lived east of the River Sindh was that they possessed beautiful things?
O' Old New Amsterdam, New New York, will all this someday end? Can you say?
Will the barbarians at our gate truly succeed at the end of the day?
And convince us that unity among men can only exist if we are all the same?
O, New York, even if so, I know you will be born again, in another generation or in another land,
That humanity shall not rest until it finds complete unity in man.
