2020 rings in another hyped-up year,
as traffic rumbles o’er this city’s streets.
The people slog through their habitual gears
as nights pass by and days repeat.
My stopping by this mill’s ancient smokestack tower
drums up crumbling dreams of 120 years ago
When rev-upped steam drove industrial power
as workers toiled to make America go.
Except for this site’s massive piled-up, silent heaps
no remnant’s here of their past incredible productivity
We hear no rumbling of gears, no wheeling peeps
Nothing but our clueless, wizzing auto-driven activity.
But down beneath those obsolete smokestack towers
under jagged rebar heaps and brickish piles
behind walls of long gone, humming industrial power
rolled miles and miles of denim 'n flannel styles.
’T’was there and then through toiling sweat and flowing tears
workers spun off vast bolts of denim cloth;
in feats of toiling ’20’s roar, then Depression fears,
cranking textile miles, yet with no thread of slouching sloth.
A shrill whistling of the factory call is no longer heard at all,
just a sunny breeze in unseasonably warm December.
These three landmark chimneys stand so stubbornly, so tall
commanding us by their stature, to remember.
As if we could remember, but no; this legacy is lost to us.
For we, so enamored, or ensnared, by electronic spell,
cannot attain to the fierce pace of their spinning, weaving opus.
Now we demolish their wornout legacy, no more to tell.
But massive was their output--their product so dearly spun;
‘though its flannel flappings waiver yet in this, our age’s fatal breeze.
Soon our bulldozing might will render this heritage undone
as fiberoptic spinning of our sorcery now weaves.
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