In the sole required text for that Intro to Western Civ
State-college course I took as a freshman, in the chapter
On the 19th century Industrial Revolution in England,
I saw farmhands by the dozens streaming up the street
From a black iron gate, their agricultural work rendered
Obsolete by mechanization, migrants from fields of grain
In the West Midland countryside who’d sought employment
In the city to support their families, creased hands and faces
As smeared with soot as the chimney-sweeping children
In William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience,
No longer rewarded for their labor by a soft pink layer
Of cloud on the horizon, in a dimness lit by oil lanterns,
In grimed bib overalls, black boots, and flat cloth caps,
Clogging the thoroughfares of the first big city to build
The “Satanic mills” derided, in Blake’s anthemic “Jerusalem”
For spoiling the beauty of “the green and pleasant land,”
Only to emerge, in the grainy black and white photograph
On the facing page, from a gray mass of slurry and steam,
In silhouette in the cobbled street like a herd of black sheep
After the 12-hour workday in the Birmingham factory—
Predecessors of my grandfather, my uncle, and my father,
Who lathed sheets of metal and labored in tool and die
For a coal-mining machinery company in Columbus, Ohio,
For more than thirty years each, who showered at work
And shot the shit with buddies in the locker room before
Car-pooling home in one or another of their shiny sedans,
Entering the house by the same door they’d left by at dawn,
Leaving behind in the locker at the shop clothes as greasy
And yellow safety helmets as hard and bright as those
Of their African American and Appalachian workmates:
Fabricators in the shed, forklift operators, and shippers
And receivers on the docks who routinely lost their fingers
Or got bonked in the head with a beam swung by a crane,
Yet who remained as proud of the things they produced,
Shovels, dozers, scrapers, loaders, excavators, draglines,
And universal cutting machines for fossil-fuel exploitation,
In spite of the deleterious eventual effects of pollution
And the unknown connection of coal to climate change
As the rough Brummie blokes at the end of the workday were
Of the practical things they made in those Birmingham mills:
Textiles made from the cotton of slave-camp plantations
In Asia and the Americas, cast iron from the coke of ore
Mined in creek-beds and forged in coal-burning furnaces,
Steam engines that “freed the manufacturing capacity
Of human society from the limited availability of hand, water,
And animal power,” sulfuric acid, a hybrid of copper
And iron known as “vitriol,” responsible for the modern
Chemical industry as we know it today, for the DuPonts
And Dows, the Chevrons and Monsantos, that make such vast
And inexpensive quantities of indispensable necessities,
Fertilizer, detergent, insecticide, and batteries, antifreeze,
Rust remover, petroleum, and paint, if not also responsible
For the raging epidemics of cancer that began to ravage
The reproductive organs, the breasts, endometria, cervixes,
Uteri, vulvas, vaginas, and ovaries of women, not to mention
Their lungs, livers, pancreases, lymph nodes, stomachs,
And brains, when the Forest of Arden, celebrated
As a retreat from civilization by Jacques in Shakespeare’s
Comedy As You Like It, was surveyed by greedy speculators
And clear-cut, like North America, for firewood and lumber.
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