The Whitman of the Industrial Heartland

Congratulations, Phillip Levine, on being the US Poet Laureate.



An Abandoned Factory, Detroit



The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,

An iron authority against the snow,

And this grey monument to common sense

Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands,

Of protest, men in league, and of the slow

Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.



Beyond, through broken windows one can see

Where the great presses paused between their strokes

And thus remain, in air suspended, caught

In the sure margin of eternity.

The cast-iron wheels have stopped; one counts the spokes

Which movement blurred, the struts inertia fought,



And estimates the loss of human power,

Experienced and slow, the loss of years,

The gradual decay of dignity.

Men lived within these foundries, hour by hour;

Nothing they forged outlived the rusted gears

Which might have served to grind their eulogy.