Dorothy
(Number 6 Blast Furnace,
 United States Steel,
 Duquesne Works)

She was a hulking brown titan
raised at river's edge
with two huge pipes for arms,
christened twenty years before
the mighty steel machine
of Pittsburgh turned to rust.

She was my childhood hero,
my hometown's giant metal monster
who rumbled with thunder,
shook the earth,
belched pillars of fire
and clouds of tarry smoke.

Legions of men, like ants
beneath her mammoth tools,
fed ore into her belly,
cast the raw stuff of skyscrapers, bridges,
as yet unformed when flowing from her womb.
Her pipes moaned, her pulleys, cables sang
in the heat of labor.
Clouds of steam billowed orange,
lulling families to sleep
with the hiss of water
cooling slag about her girth.

We thought she'd live forever...

That's why we mourned the day
she cast her final burden
and fell cold, quiet in the night.
Dorothy was now a ghost, a skeleton,
a silent chunk of steel
rusting in the rain.

Then came the day when sirens wailed
and we held our breath in silence,
waiting...

Blinding white flashes
burned her with a light harsher
than molten iron.
Thuds echoed down the valley --
Dorothy groaned forward,
rose painfully upright,
then collapsed backward forever
into the ruins of history.

Scott Speck
09/03/01