At Sparrow's Point

In the darkness before dawn,
a distant, churning roar,
a sky flickering with light
draws me from bed 
to stand upon the shore.

I gaze across the bay
to clouds of billowy steam,
stacks belching smoke,
sharp blue tongues of fire

where men of steel toil
among the mammoth tools of industry --
pipes, ovens, mills --
riveted, welded beneath facades
of the same rusty metal they birth

from one towering titan
of a Furnace, crowned with blood-red 
eyes, unblinking, brooding above
a belly birthing pools 
of molten iron.

While neighbors sleep off
last week's memory like a dream,
one giant flame leaps
a hundred feet into the sky,
its yellow-white flash lingering.

From inside this Vulcan's forge, 
orange fires warm
the purple clouds of October
blown inland from the ocean;
steam rises in a cylindrical veil
that turns, turns,
vanishes on the wind...

Scott Speck
10/11/2003