- My name is Robert Bensen.

The title of the poem is "US Steel, 1966."

"Pushed white-hot from the furnace mouth, two half-ton billets squeeze through rollers, bullet-speed to the reeler, then coil and cool.

At least they're supposed to, three shifts a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks, non-stop.

This is wartime.

But this one hit wrong, cobbled, looped, and slithered out on the walkway's cement.

An hour lost, no limbs, but fix the roller, run a test sample.

Get back on the clock and roll that steel.

The whole shift gathered for the test, Black men come north from the mills of Mobile and Bethlehem.

Plus me.

Their glance said give the new white kid a chance.

So I took the tongs, squared up to ram the test piece through.

But I botched the heave-ho.

They make it look so easy.

I backed it off.

Gathered all my puny strength, and another scrape, another dead-stop in the channel.

Then the biggest man I ever saw took off his hard hat, stepped toward me, and in the kindliest way offered me his massive hand as if he were welcoming me to his church.

In a way, he was, the church of men who commune with fire and steel, who give of their bodies and blood, their days and nights, their years, who curse and bless each other with equal conviction.

I hand-signed for one more, one more try.

I clamped the tongs on that cherry-red hot piece of shit and somehow found the strength in the place where they must find theirs and leaned in and slammed it home.

The roller bit that billet and nearly took me with it, but I yanked the tongs free.

Then behind me, muffled in asbestos gloves, applause.

I turned and made my first bow, just because.

The all-clear horn sounded look alive, look alive, look alive, and we went back to our death-trap stations to make the steel that made the weapons that made the war.

Sometimes when the mill breaks down, I'd step out in the steamy night, lay down on a rail between my shoulder blades, cross my ankles, my whole length stretched out on that polished, cold steel.

I'd get lost in the depth of stars, and in the silence of the shut-down, heard my ears ring.

Hard hat for a pillow, body drained enough to catch some Z's until five flatcars of billets juddered into the yard and I roll off in time.

But the blues that blue steel sang up my spine and still sings 50 years later.

The whole mill is gone, down to the concrete foundation.

The men, where did they go?

And their names?

The office building where my sister worked is gone, the machine shop where her husband worked is gone, Their 50 years of marriage is gone.

That's more than most of us get, unless we're blessed or lucky, and we hear that whistle blow, someone summoned, and we all, one by one, get to go home."

(gentle music) (gentle music continues)