Building Trucks

Steel plates, beams and castings come together in the factory to form assemblies, then frames, and finally trucks. It always fascinated me to watch it happen--plates and beams moved into place by fork trucks to be bolted into assemblies, assemblies hanging on chains from overhead cranes, gliding slowly through the air, until all met at the welder's station. Some of the trucks they made could carry a 400-ton payload. I wondered how the welders felt, holding the power to make such an incredible machine. 

Building Trucks

This skeleton I shape

Will soon be clothed in strength

To haul a hundred tons of stone

Gouged out of the mountain.

Now it hangs in pieces

Bound with chains,

Hollow pieces revealed

Joints unfashioned,

Awaiting the touch of fire

From my hand.

copyright 2011

Nightwork

Before I became a corporate communications specialist, I actually did use some of the knowledge of welding I gained at great loss of dignity and confidence (YOU see what it's like to have a spark down your shirt), doing ultrasound checks of welds to make sure they had no flaws. I worked second shift and sometimes had to stay over four. A casual comment from a third-shifter one of those nights led to this more traditional, rhyming, poem:

Third Shift

I lay beside her briefly before I left for work tonight.
She didn't even know when I arose.
I crept into the hall before I turned on any light,
And silently slipped into my clothes.

In the room across the hall the baby sleeps
In the glow of her Cookie Monster light.
A dream of breast-warm milk moves her tiny cheeks
As I walk out alone into the night.

An empty tar-dark highway leads me miles away
Into a world of noise and fire and smoke,
Where I carve steel into parts for unseen trucks,
And dream about my wife in bed at home.

copyright 2011