ironscribe

They would have had me graze on shellfish.
They fed me with mussels and clams,
titbits of oysters, the sweet flesh of crabs.
They clothed me in rags of sailcloth and seaweed
and taught me to walk.

They showed me only tenderness,
lullabied me to the rhythms
of the suck and rush of tides.
“Listen,” they said,
and held the conch shell to my ear.
“Listen, Hephaistos …”
But I had ears for something else.

In the rage at the world’s core
the molten metal slops and seethes,
thrusts upwards through faultlines
to scar and scab the green.

In caves by the Aegean
I watched the fires that played across the water,
smelt the sulphur on the brine,
saw in their flickering something that was mine
and set myself to win it.

Over centuries I refined and purified,
drew riches out of rock, till in my hands I held
the essences of Tin, and Lead,
of Copper, Zinc and Iron,
prised unalloyed from lodestone.
And wrought in them
the slow, arrested, liquid shapes
of the element that broke my fall.