Vox Populi
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Michael Simms: Thinking of the Rapture at Castriota Metals and Recycling
I spent an hour
watching a crane
lower its giant arm
to a pile of scrap iron
lifting bundles
of wire mesh
shattered televisions
broken toaster ovens
spatulas scissors
frying pans fence posts
whole bags of rusty nails
even shoes hanging by
the metal aglets
at the tips of their laces
Leaving behind
the aluminum bones of lawn chairs
broken teeth of clay tiles
and a headless doll whose
one arm stretched toward me
as if I could save her
for Elizabeth
~~~~
Michael Simms is the founding editor of Vox Populi. His most recent novel is The Blessed Isle (Madville, 2025), and his most recent collection of poems is Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025).
Poem copyright 2023 Michael Simms. From Strange Meadowlark by Michael Simms (Ragged Sky 2023). Drawing copyright 2025 Adrian Piper.
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I commented but it wouldn’t let me post the comment saying duplicate and I’d already said that?
I wrote I know you’d save that doll if you could. It’s an excellent piece! ~ Deborah DeNicola
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Michael, I love that doll at the end! I know you’d save her if you could!
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Thank you, Deborah. I appreciate you and your work.
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Powerful poem, Michael, I love that doll at the end! And the list is also so rich!
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My imagination finds this rapture/castriota poem very “magnetic”! Each time I read it, it delivers up a new emotional insight. The contrast between spiritual “rapture” and the carnal evocations of “castriota.” The arm of the crane and the arm of the doll. How the fundamental metals of the universe will outlast human bones, teeth, limbs—heaven is hard rock, not ether. Also, for me, the poem reinterprets Salvation (the salvage)as the 21st century struggle between machines and mind. In our century, will rare earth metals and nano chips be engineered into the ultimate agent that decides who—or what—will survive, regenerating into eternity?
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Thank you so much for this fascinating and intelligent analysis of the poem, Therese!
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I love all the sounds and textures in this fine, fine poem, Michael❤️
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Thanks, Lisa!
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My friend Bill, the retired philosophy prof: wrote the following response:
Fascinating. As a former employee of an auto salvage yard (in Denver) I resonate to the vibrations of junk and scrap metal. The doll image is gripping. I got pleasure from hauling stripped hulks of cars – all imports – to the shredder, having the giant magnet lift them off the bed of the overloaded pickup, knowing that they were headed, much modified, down to CF & I Steel in Pueblo to be turned into nails for the construction industry. Not so much pleasure since then realizing that those gazillions of nails were used to fasten together the disastrous urban sprawl metastasizing east of Denver. At least the stuff was recycled. I could write a lot about that salvage yard and its denizens, human and otherwise. There are a lot of stories I could tell about that salvage yard, such as the fact that the most rewarding part of the job was playing with the dog. A really sweet black German Shepherd – real junkyard dog!
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Ah the immense, loud and poignant crunch of a metaphor in this poem! The helplessness of the poet facing this destruction. That little arm still reaching out. How you caught this most beautifully, humbly and perfectly, Michael.
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Thank you so much, beautiful poet! Your praise is like honey for me.
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The philosopher George Yancy sent me this comment:
“I sent this comment to Vox Populi, but I didn’t see it posted.
I wrote:
Hi Michael, you had me at “one arm stretched toward me as if I could save her.” There is this sense of longing that is communicated by the one arm stretched toward you. Amid so much waste, so much consumption, there is this discarded headless doll that seems to desire someone who might care for it. All those bits and pieces of “junk” were at some point heady-to-hand, functional and useful within a complex whole, a world of human transactions, vibrant sites of meaningfulness. So, the “one arm stretched” breaks through the amorphous trash, symbolically reminding us that this one arm, this headless doll, this cultural artifact, meant something to someone, brought someone joy. And you were there to bear witness not just to the waste, but to a specific subject-object relationship that was severed, no doubt deeply cherished at some point in the past. Also, the drawing by artist-philosopher Andrian Piper is so apropos. On a side note, I’m good friends with Adrian. She is the first African American woman tenured philosopher in the US.”
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Thank you so much, George!
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good poem by a distinguished poet.
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Thank you, Saleh. I’m honored by your words. Are you still living in UAE or have you returned to Syria?
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I came to Aleppo in September just to witness the doomsday on 8th December. I was on street back on foot home. The scene was like what could happen in any scary movie. I have a visa to return to UAE to join my wife but i need a permit from the officials. I am on this. The sad news i could not locate the place of my only son. I guess they tortured then killed him before sending him to a mass grave yard. It is a nightmare occurs every night when i am alone in a flat on top of five floors bu
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Oh, Saleh. I’m so sorry for you and your family. I hope the nightmare is over…
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What I love is that the poem makes no judgement, claims no thesis, merely lets each reader decide what they want to make of it. Capitalist critique? Photographic snapshot? Paean to Baudelairean beauty? We decide.
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Thanks, Tony! You got it. The ambiguity of perceived reality…
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I love this build-up of images and then that killer of an ending!!!
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Thanks, Meg!
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It’s all been said, Michael. 😦
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Yes, I suppose it has all been said before….
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No, what I mean is: all the others have said what I might have said. I didn’t want to repeat.
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No, Michael, what I mean is: all the others have said what I might have said. I didn’t want to repeat.
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thanks for the clarification, Rose Mary. I appreciate your comments here.
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No day goes by that I don’t think about our gargantuan accumulation of discarded consumer stuff, their toxins and plastic creeping into everything including our own bodies. We’ve fouled our nest and your poem bears witness to that fact. TOYS ‘R’ TOXIC.
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Thanks, Alfred.
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Vivid ekphrastic work of sorting, of what’s left behind.
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Thanks, Marty!
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What a wonderland of discarded objects you’ve created, Michael. It was an hour of your watching well spent and well remembered, and now well worth sharing.
By an odd coincidence I was told yesterday by friend Bill, that the “Rapture” was invented by one John Nelson Darby in the 1830s. “His idea is a prize example of a pre-internet meme” that has since become a part of the rusty scrap iron of right-wing theology.
Thanks for turning the term into something different.
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Thank you for your generous comment, Jim. I didn’t know this bit of history.
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As I’ve been spending time with Vincent Van Gogh, I think of Vox Populi and the posting of poems here much like Vincent’s painting of the Sower (1888), where the sower is the poet casting poems like seeds into our lives, and Vox Populi is the sun enlivening the process.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0029v1962
public domain image
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High praise! Van Gogh! Wow! Thank you, Jim.
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Those Whitmanesque lists are an indictment of capitalism and the organized forgetfulness of overconsumption, and end with a heart-pounding finale.
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You are spot on with the critique of overconsumption, Yongbo. Thank you!
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Ah, Michael, you’ve made me think of just how I’ve spent the last hour, of what has been in sight, of what I’ve chosen to see, of those sights from which I have kept myself safe. All of them calling for our care.
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Thank you, Luray. I’m usually in my own little world thinking mainly of me, and I miss the experience of the gloriously absurd world.
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Me too
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Thanks, Barbara!
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The world inside a headless doll. So much in this poem that reaches toward us. Thanks, Michael.
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Thanks, Emily, for your kind words. And thank you also for all you do for the Palestinian cause.
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Thanks a lot
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Beautiful metaphysical poetry. Wonderful also is the drawing that expresses the concept of poetry well. Thank youe.
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Thank you so much, Marina. I feel we are kindred spirits even though you are on the other side of the world.
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“Leaving behind
the aluminum bones of lawn chairs”, these lines give me such a sharp image Michael
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Thanks, Helen.
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