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
- Down By The Salley Gardens by William Butler Yeats
- Яков Полонский – Чтобы песня моя разлилась как поток
- The Precinct. Rochester poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Are You the New person, drawn toward Me? by Walt Whitman
- Making Light Of It by Philip Levine
- I have fallen into unconsciousness by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- When Love Is Over
- The Bonny Hind poem – Andrew Lang poems
- She Looks by Mac McGovern
- Silver by Walter de la Mare
- The Hosting Of The Sidhe by William Butler Yeats
- Untitled VIII by Yunus Emre
- And their feet move by Sappho
- Robert Burns: Jerusalem Tavern, Dumfries.: Inscription On A Goblet
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песня о штангисте
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