Faces by Adam Zagajewski

Evening on the market square I saw shining faces 
of people I didn’t know.  I looked greedily 
at people’s faces: each was different,
each said something, persuaded
laughed, endured.

I thought that the city is built not of houses, 
squares, boulevards, parks, wide streets,
but of faces gleaming like lamps,
like the torches of welders, who mend
steel in clouds of sparks at night.

~ from Unseen Hand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009)