When visiting my mother last February (pre-COVID) she mentioned that she had recently reread one of her childhood nursery rhyme books and flagged a poem that happened to mention Harlem (and is clearly a New York-based poem).

Aside from the rather casual violence in what was supposed to be children’s literature, it was interesting to see this early 20th-century poem refer to Harlem as ‘wilds remote’:

Given New York’s recent experience with tropical storm Isaias, the line about ‘a cyclone’ also seemed rather dark in tone.