walls…
  Mouthing of engines, made rabid with power,
  Into the holocaust snorting and plunging…

  Mighty converters torn from their axis,
  Flung to the furnaces, vomiting fire,
  Jumbled in white-heaten masses disshapen…
  Writhing in flame-tortured levers of iron…

  Gnashing of steel serpents twisting and dying…
  Screeching of steam-glutted cauldrons rending…
  Shock of leviathans prone on each other…
  Scaled flanks touching, ore entering ore…
  Steel haunches closing and grappling and swaying
  In the waltz of the mating locked mammoths of iron,
  Tasting the turbulent fury of living,
  Mad with a moment's exuberant living!
  Crash of devastating hammers despoiling..
  Hands inexorable, marring
  What hands had so cunningly moulded…

  Structures of steel welded, subtily tempered,
  Marvelous wrought of the wizards of ore,
  Torn into octaves discordantly clashing,
  Chords never final but onward progressing
  In monstrous fusion of sound ever smiting on sound
       in mad vortices whirling…

  Till the ear, tortured, shrieks for cessation
  Of the raving inharmonies hatefully mingling…
  The fierce obligato the steel pipes are screaming…
  The blare of the rude molten music of Iron…

FRANK LITTLE AT CALVARY

I

  He walked under the shadow of the Hill
  Where men are fed into the fires
  And walled apart…
  Unarmed and alone,
  He summoned his mates from the pit's mouth
  Where tools rested on the floors
  And great cranes swung
  Unemptied, on the iron girders.
  And they, who were the Lords of the Hill,
  Were seized with a great fear,
  When they heard out of the silence of wheels
  The answer ringing
  In endless reverberations
  Under the mountain…

  So they covered up their faces
  And crept upon him as he slept…
  Out of eye-holes in black cloth
  They looked upon him who had flung
  Between them and their ancient prey
  The frail barricade of his life…
  And when night—that has connived at so much—
  Was heavy with the unborn day,
  They haled him from his bed…

  Who might know of that wild ride?
  Only the bleak Hill—
  The red Hill, vigilant,
  Like a blood-shot eye
  In the black mask of night—
  Dared watch them as they raced
  By each blind-folded street
  Godiva might have ridden down…
  But when they stopped beside the Place,
  I know he turned his face
  Wistfully to the accessory night…

  And when he saw—against the sky,
  Sagged like a silken net
  Under its load of stars—
  The black bridge poised
  Like a gigantic spider motionless…
  I know there was a silence in his heart,
  As of a frozen sea,
  Where some half lifted arm, mid-way
  Wavers, and drops heavily…

  I know he waved to life,
  And that life signaled back, transcending space,
  To each high-powered sense,
  So that he missed no gesture of the wind
  Drawing the shut leaves close…
  So that he saw the light on comrades' faces
  Of camp fires out of sight…
  And the savor of meat and bread
  Blew in his nostrils… and the breath
  Of unrailed spaces
  Where shut wild clover smelled as sweet
  As a virgin in her bed.

  I know he looked once at America,
  Quiescent, with her great flanks on the globe,
  And once at the skies whirling above him…
  Then all that he had spoken against
  And struck against and thrust against
  Over the frail barricade of his life
  Rushed between him and the stars…

II

  Life thunders on…
  Over the black bridge
  The line of lighted cars
  Creeps like a monstrous serpent
  Spooring gold…

Watchman, what of the track?

  Night… silence… stars…
  All's Well!

III

  Light…
  (Breaking mists…
  Hills gliding like hands out of a slipping hold…)
  Light over the pit mouths,
  Streaming in tenuous rays down the black gullets of the Hill…
  (The copper, insensate, sleeping in the buried lode.)
  Light…
  Forcing the clogged windows of arsenals…
  Probing with long sentient fingers in the copper chips…
  Gleaming metallic and cold
  In numberless slivers of steel…
  Light over the trestles and the iron clips
  Of the black bridge—poised like a gigantic spider motionless—
  Sweet inquisition of light, like a child's wonder…
  Intrusive, innocently staring light
  That nothing appals…

  Light in the slow fumbling summer leaves,
  Cooing and calling
  All winged and avid things
  Waking the early flies, keen to the scent…
  Green-jeweled iridescent flies
  Unerringly steering—
  Swarming over the blackened lips,
  The young day sprays with indiscriminate gold…

Watchman, what of the Hill?

  Wheels turn;
  The laden cars
  Go rumbling to the mill,
  And Labor walks beside the mules…
  All's Well with the Hill!

SPIRES

  Spires of Grace Church,
  For you the workers of the world
  Travailed with the mountains…
  Aborting their own dreams
  Till the dream of you arose—
  Beautiful, swaddled in stone—
  Scorning their hands.

THE LEGION OF IRON

  They pass through the great iron gates—
  Men with eyes gravely discerning,
  Skilled to appraise the tunnage of cranes
  Or split an inch into thousandths—
  Men tempered by fire as the ore is
  And planned to resistance
  Like steel that has cooled in the trough;
  Silent of purpose, inflexible, set to fulfilment—
  To conquer, withstand, overthrow…
  Men mannered to large undertakings,
  Knowing force as a brother
  And power as something to play with,
  Seeing blood as a slip of the iron,
  To be wiped from the tools
  Lest they rust.

  But what if they stood aside,
  Who hold the earth so careless in the crook of their arms?

  What of the flamboyant cities
  And the lights guttering out like candles in a wind…
  And the armies halted…
  And the train mid-way on the mountain
  And idle men chaffing across the trenches…
  And the cursing and lamentation
  And the clamor for grain shut in the mills of the world?
  What if they stayed apart,
  Inscrutably smiling,
  Leaving the ground encumbered with dead wire
  And the sea to row-boats
  And the lands marooned—
  Till Time should like a paralytic sit,
  A mildewed hulk above the nations squatting?

FUEL

  What of the silence of the keys
  And silvery hands? The iron sings…
  Though bows lie