ironscribe

It’s the teasing out of stories
from blunt stock.
The refinement of endings.

Take a strand of steel and
heat it till the crystals’ mesh unknits;
then compress

the livid end between the downward shock
of hammer-blow,
the counter-force

that is the anvil’s weight:
the sheer, unmoving mass of it.
The physics say that softness yields

and elongates.
You feel its stretch through hammer’s head
and hammer shaft –

the grain a telegraph to left-side brain,
the left hand knurled upon the stock
to centre and align

the bar beneath the blows.
And steel is sinuous,
not cast as liquid

but dislodged
towards a rearrangement, thinning out.
It’s drawn down to a vanish-point

where blows run out on silence,
unsounded, and unnecessary.
The point made.