Elegy for Little Girls
Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham, September 16th, 1963
 
Jake Adam York

Puncture the mud, the iron pours out
                                  • 
tongue of fire, not a word
                                  •
stays still but breaks along the channels
                                  •
pressed in the cast floor’s sand.
                                  •
Now it’s pigs suckling at the sow’s
                                  •
iron teats, so many children blind
                                  •
to the air and world that harden them.
                                  •
A gift. Dark come on. When
                                  •
the slag-man pulls the plug, fire
                                  •
explodes, its violent, molten light 
                                  •
bathes the irons, a glow on their spines 
                                  •
like stained glass or twilight fades
                                  •
on headstones’ crests, row on row on row.
 

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