Tonight's Poet Corner: Steel

Steel
by Belinda Roddie

Tin and aluminum
folds,
compresses
into coils and worms,
squeezed
into cylinders,
manufactured
for the great consumer.

Iron turns red and
grows
rusty even while enduring
sun and storm and sleet,
while the fences fray away.
But

steel is the color of the
uniforms that streak across
the chrome sky where all the cold
marrow is sucked out of bone.

We
do not wish to fight with steel.
We merely wish to
build with steel.
And until these towers are not toppled,
even though we do not like it,
we

salute
the men in steel,
salute them fighting,
salute them
dying.

In Memoriam.