Fe

    Is this how we are forged,
    Struck from the womb in an Anglo Saxon phrase?
    To be beaten or cast into fashion or form
    Over which no control is possible.
    A tempering by  smith or by Vulcan into
    a shape that yet retains our own polarity?

    Do we forge ourselves into sword or plough;
    Into magnet or barbed live wire;
    Into firegrate, penknib, knife or vat
    That our parents or school marm have wished?
    Or were their designs beyond their means,
    Distorted by the fires of a fiercer furnace?

    Was the polish rubbed off a bright future
    by the stains of experience or fatigue
    And tell a final tale of corrosion
    Under the influence of  water, air
    and the stronger Bru?
    Can the archaeologist  tell the true form against the age?

    I think on all the tempering
    that others have endured, enjoyed or borne.
    To remain sharp and Sheffield bright
    Or dulled into a sullen bluntness
    Of uncaring barbs and razor sharp swarf
    That can draw oxide red blood with unfeeling words.
   
    To be as smoothly oiled
    As by the trusty engineer or  joiner’s craft
    or blackened by the simple cook
    retaining all vestige of the pleasure
    of the making and the  use.
    To be savoured again into the memory  impressed.

    To cut through the times and grain
    with the confidence of a two handed saw.
    To shoe the horse and the wheel
    To roll the world into the greener grass,
     Mowed by the scythes and threshed
    Into a future where iron no longer rules.

    To fire the ball into the foe
    And cut the the swathes to freedom.
    To hold and form the gate
    To keep the peace or lock in,
    Or out of, the honest moil,
    The corruption that would steal it’s own future.

    To link so many chains and padlock us
    into a  holdfast secure to all
    Or bridge the gap between dividing banks.
    Have we still the formulae for this
    or abandoned it for a weaker earth
    That depends on transition of unseen force?

    Must I rust into impassive mechanism
    And lose all use in the failing of my nuts and bolts?
    Lose my temper, far too brittle to survive the strains.
    Ill-usage and fatigue change the tasks I must do
    Into a grating of pain
    where entropy works far faster on me than on iron.
   
    Do all our parts finally meld
    In an atomic fluidity at our core
    That sends a world spinning and holds the Solar storms
    Or steel a Universe into a iron will that
    Decrees our final mettle.
    Or will a mixture with gall and shredded wood be all that lasts?