Wartime Quilt

A wartime quilt – an example of one of roughly 100 extant 18th and 19th century quilts made by convalescing British soldiers from the fabric of their uniforms.

Exhibited by the American Folk Art Museum in New York, fall 2017.

The Rosehead Nail

by A. E. Stallings

[Conversation at a blacksmithing demonstration, mountain arts and crafts fair, Monteagle, TN]

“But can you forge a nail?” the blond boy asks,
And the blacksmith shoves a length of iron rod
Deep in the coal fire cherished by the bellows
Until it glows volcanic. He was a god
Before anachronism, before the tasks
That had been craft were jobbed out to machine.
By dint of   hammer-song he makes his keen,
Raw point, and crowns utility with rose:
Quincunx of facets petaling its head.
The breeze-made-visible sidewinds. The boy’s
Blonde mother shifts and coughs. Once Work was wed
To Loveliness — sweat-faced, swarthy from soot, he
Reminds us with the old saw he employs
(And doesn’t miss a beat): “Smoke follows beauty.”

Source: Poetry (May 2013)

Vulcan Forging a Helmet

[from] the Eneas Romance of Heinrich Von  Veldeke.  Artist unknown.

Von Veldeke (roughly 1150 – 1185) is said to be the first writer in the Low Countries known by name to have written in a European language other than Latin.  His Eneas Romance is loosely derived from Virgil’s Aeneid.

[from] Psalm 90

[The psalmist calls on us to see our work in relation to the Creator’s grace.]

 

“May the sweetness of the Lord be upon us, to confirm the work we have done!”

Psalm 90, verse 17, New Jerusalem Bible.

The Cement Plant

by Joshua Mehigan

The cement plant was like a huge still
nailed in gray corrugated panels
and left out forty-five years ago
in the null center of a meadow
to tax itself to remorseless death
near a black stream and briars, where
from the moment it began to breathe,
it began falling apart and burning.
But it still went, and the men were paid.

The plant made dust. Impalpably fine,
hung in a tawny alkaline cloud,
swept into drifts against mill room piers,
frozen by rain on silo ledges,
dust was its first and its final cause.
Pinups were traced on their car windshields.
Dust gave them jobs, and killed some of them.
Late into evening their teeth grated.
Its product was dust, its problem dust.

The thing was blind to all its own ends
but the one. Men’s ordinary lives,
measured out on a scale alien
to that on which its life was measured,
were spent in crawling the junk machine,
fitting new gaskets, screws, and bearings,
deceiving it towards the mood required
for it to avail and pay. Somehow
it did. None cheered it. It sustained them.

Source: Poetry (October 2012)

Mississauga Cement Plant

Jorgen Lauritzen, oil on canvas

Thanks to March and April contributors

Thanks to Tom Geoghegan, who contributed posts in March and April.

 

Contributions and suggestions are always welcome!