For a hidden and glimpsing moon.

This, said the bar-iron shed to the blooming mill,
This is the slang of coal and steel.
The day-gang hands it to the night-gang,
The night-gang hands it back.

Stammer at the slang of this-
Let us understand half of it.

In the rolling mills and sheet mills,
In the harr and boom of the blast fires,
The smoke changes its shadow

And men change their shadow;

A nigger, a wop, a bohunk changes.

A bar of steel-it is only

Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man. A runner of fire ran in it, ran out, ran somewhere else, And left smoke and the blood of a man

And the finished steel, chilled and blue.

So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again,
And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel,
A rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky;
And always dark in the heart and through it,
Smoke and the blood of a man.

Pittsburg, Youngstown, Gary-they make their steel with men.

In the blood of men and the ink of chimneys

The smoke nights write their oaths:

Smoke into steel and blood into steel;

Homestead, Braddock, Birmingham, they make their steel

with men.

Smoke and blood is the mix of steel.

The birdmen drone

In the blue; it is steel

a motor sings and zooms.

Steel barb-wire around The Works.

Steel guns in the holsters of the guards at the gates of The Works.

Steel ore-boats bring the loads clawed from the earth by steel, lifted and lugged by arms of steel, sung on its way by the clanking clam-shells.

The runners now, the handlers now, are steel; they dig and clutch and haul; they hoist their automatic knuckles from job to job; they are steel making steel. Fire and dust and air fight in the furnaces; the pour is timed, the billets wriggle; the clinkers are dumped: Liners on the sea, skyscrapers on the land; diving steel in the sea, climbing steel in the sky.

BLUE ISLAND INTERSECTION

Six street ends come together here.

They feed people and wagons into the center.

In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags, Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby buggies.

Six ends of streets and no sleep for them all day.
The people and wagons come and go, out and in.
Triangles of banks and drug stores watch.
The policemen whistle, the trolley cars bump:
Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day.

In the false dawn when the chickens blink
And the east shakes a lazy baby toe at to-morrow,
And the east fixes a pink half-eye this way,
In the time when only one milk wagon crosses
These three streets, these six street ends,
It is the sleep time and they rest.
The triangle banks and drug stores rest.

The policeman is gone, his star and gun sleep.
The owl car blutters along in a sleep-walk.

CLEAN CURTAINS

New neighbors came to the corner house at Congress and Green streets.

The look of their clean white curtains was the same as the rim of a nun's bonnet.

One way was an oyster pail factory, one way they made candy, one way paper boxes, strawboard cartons.

The warehouse trucks shook the dust of the ways loose and the wheels whirled dust—there was dust of hoof and wagon wheel and rubber tire-dust of police

and fire wagons-dust of the winds that circled at midnights and noon listening to no prayers.

"O mother, I know the heart of you," I sang passing the rim of a nun's bonnet-O white curtains-and people clean as the prayers of Jesus here in the faded ramshackle at Congress and Green.

Dust and the thundering trucks won-the barrages of the street wheels and the lawless wind took their way-was it five weeks or six the little mother, the new neighbors, battled and then took away the white prayers in the windows?

A. E. F.

There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart,
The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust.

A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it.

The trigger and the range-finder, they too will be rusty. And no hands will polish the gun, and it will hang on the wall.

Forefingers and thumbs will point absently and casually toward it.

It will be spoken among half-forgotten, wished-to-beforgotten things.

They will tell the spider: Go on, you're doing good

work.

NOCTURNE IN A DESERTED BRICKYARD

Stuff of the moon

Runs on the lapping sand
Out to the longest shadows.

Under the curving willows,

And round the creep of the wave line,

Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters

Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.

GRASS

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work-

I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this?

Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

Adelaide Crapsey

Adelaide Crapsey was born, September 9, 1878, at Rochester, New York, where she spent her childhood. She entered Vassar College in 1897, graduating with the class of 1901. Two years