November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 1: I am attempting the November poem-a-day challenge again this year.
Please feel free to comment or ignore. These will not be great poems.
All Saints' Day, 2011
tool and die maker,
writer of tolerances, martyr of a silent cause,
surrounded by endless noise,
saint in side-shields & glasses,
sideburns of shifting lengths,
shirtsleeves, buttonhole stretch.
our patron in polyester, leather,
plastic, steel, zinc, chromium,
aluminum, thyroid, tumor, trachea,
larynx, cartilage, tissue & blood.
what shall we do with the icons:
slide rule, tape measure, earplugs,
pocketprotector, pocketknife, caliper,
micrometer, lathe, mill, collet & drill?
******
I remember walking in the building,
the hum of hard work,
men in plastic hats, work gloves, tools
names on doors,
names on shirts,
names of men,
names of ghosts.
Machine sounds from below
grinding, spinning, ripping,
the pounding of metal on metal,
the thin reverb of clinking sheets,
the smell of oil, hydraulic fluid & sweat,
a coppery film on the tongue,
& the smile of a job well done.
It’s easy to see this as a type of prayer:
the precision of measurement,
hallowed be thy name
the dynamics of cast, form & mold,
thy will be done
the purity of pattern, blueprint & ASME code
on Earth as it is…
*****
Let the tabled figures stand in place of miracle,
the assembled goods, long forgotten, demand canonization.
May the patron of makers, of machinists, of poets,
pray for us, our products, & our words.
There's something larger than life about this poem, and no, it's not the WCW epigraph. I like the first stanza after the ***** the best, especially 'names of ghosts' because I think it can be read on many levels.
ReplyDeleteThanks. Not to demystify, but many of the men that my dad worked with at "the plant" also caught the cancer. Several of them, like dad, are now ghosts.
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