Making It Work
by Philip Levine
3-foot blue cannisters of nitro
along a conveyor belt, slow fish
speaking the language of silence.
On the roof, I in my respirator
patching the asbestos gas lines
as big around as the thick waist
of an oak tree. “These here are
the veins of the place, stuff
inside’s the blood.” We work in rain,
heat, snow, sleet. First warm
spring winds up from Ohio, I
pause at the top of the ladder
to take in the wide world reaching
downriver and beyond. Sunlight
dumped on standing and moving
lines of freight cars, new fields
of bright weeds blowing, scoured
valleys, false mountains of coke
and slag. At the ends of sight
a rolling mass of clouds as dark
as money brings the weather in.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Владимир Луговской – Конек-горбунок
- Вера Полозкова – Да что у меня, нормально всё, так, условно
- Your Last Drive by Thomas Hardy
- Алексей Жемчужников – Возрождение
- On Receiving Heyne’s Virgil From Mr. Hayley by William Cowper
- Sidelined by Satish Verma
- Николай Заболоцкий – Старость
- Нина Воронель – Высокосный год
- Mine Sweepers by Rudyard Kipling
- My Song by Rabindranath Tagore
- Song—Awa’, Whigs, Awa’ by Robert Burns
- Sonet 33 by William Alexander
- An English Breeze by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Life, wait for me by Martin Zakovski
- I’ve Got a Golden Ticket by Roald Dahl
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).
Philip Levine ( 1928 – 2015) was an American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for more than thirty years in the English department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012