Baltimore Was Always Blue
by Michael Salcman
Goodbye America of the blue overalls and steel-toed boots,
goodbye, goodbye. The headline in The Sun said it all today
in type as tall as the re-election of a president:
General Motors Closes Its Broening Highway Plant.
Don’t you remember when they said what was good for GM
was good for America? In the Forties they called men like Bob
at the gym “expediters”—they sorted parts for fifty cents
an hour, everything in its proper place at the right time.
Goodbye to you and the smell of cayenne and cinnamon
drifting over the Inner Harbor when it had rotting piers
and McCormick Spice. Goodbye, goodbye General Mills,
Bendix and Western Electric, farewell to the steel plate
and memories of Liberty ships, their hulls bent true and shaped
at Sparrows Point by thirty thousand hands. Goodbye
to London Fog, its raincoats and umbrellas, “Born in Baltimore,
Raised Everywhere”, and sterling silver candlesticks
turned on lathes in Hamden. Goodbye steel beams,
locomotives and trains, automobiles and ships,
military bombers, telephones, stoves and Natty Bo Beer.
Over half a century, a city dies a thousand cuts: condos rise
where breweries stood, the Ritz-Carlton goes up at Beth Steel,
and office towers are put where Proctor and Gamble made soap
on the harbor. Near Seagirt Marine, 7000 men (and women too)
made metal vans, things on wheels we import from Japan.
For seventy years, while New York and Chicago wore tweed
topcoats and gray fedoras, Baltimore was dressed in blue.
Now it’s goodbye to factory whistles, tin hats, lunch pails
filled with ham and mayonnaise. No welders eat Italian
on Holabird Avenue, no salesmen sleep
at the Brentwood and Carson Inns, no one raises a shot to a crab
at the Poncabird Pub. It’s goodbye to all that.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Юлий Даниэль – Часовой
- Catharina : The Second Part. On Her Marriage To George Courtenay, Esq. by William Cowper
- Владимир Корнилов – Жара
- Владимир Маяковский – Размышления у парадного подъезда
- To Sr Henry Vane The Younger poem – John Milton poems
- I Want It Now by Roald Dahl
- Joker of the Pack by Shekhar Srinivasan
- Balin and Balan poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Ione, Dead the Long Year poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Иннокентий Анненский – Леконт де Лиль. Из стихотворения «Призраки»
- Sea Shell poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- On A Drop Of Dew poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- Meaning of silence-ness.
- Song For A Summer’s Day by Sylvia Plath
- With a Book poem – by Ambrose Bierce poems | Poems and Poetry
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).
