New Boy in the Factory
Dim haze in the long gray building;
smoke of molten metal, faint and acrid.
Banging, burning, hissing sounds
emerge from every torch bright niche.
The sun struggles through the thick and
cracked two layered windows,
to light the dirty concrete floor.
A workman, sandy haired, impassive face,
bends to his practiced task,
lean muscles shaped by farm and steel,
the feel of wood and iron, smoke and sun.
He stops, and lights his pipe to talk,
slow and seasoned blacksmith
in a new time.
Taciturn, practical,
knowing things that I will never know,
he speaks, bemused, and rarely smiles.
Tolerant, he lets my callow statements pass,
as if he were once as young and green as I.
He puffs his pipe, and looks me in the eye,
quite serious; and nods his head and talks
as if I too were practiced in his trade,
though I am fresh from school
and only know things in my young presumptuous head—
not through scars, and burns, and weathered hands;
not deep inside the bone and fiber.
In the evening
I go home to television, piles of books,
notebooks piled with half formed thoughts;
and he goes home to tend his farm,
build fence, care for the animals.
And in the mornings
out by the weathered barn,
the cow's steaming breath in the small field,
the frost crackling on the grass—
he goes about his daily chores
while I read a book over breakfast;
—coffee steaming on the kitchen table
in the light of yellow lamps.
4
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1 comment
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Very moving study in contrasts
pixiedust
Level 8
May 20, 2018
1
Thank you.
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