Gail Langstroth: Easter Sunday
then The Sun This Morning : one round, middle C
Audio: Jack Gilbert reads his poems
Reading poems from The Great Fires, some of them in earlier versions, Jack Gilbert looks back on the loves and solitudes of a life lived acutely, seen in terms of the Pittsburgh steel mills where he worked as a youth
Mel Packer: The Bend on the River Road from Homestead
A falling down, bullet-pocked sheet metal wall
Once erected to mark the edges of the
South Side Jones and Laughlin steel mill
Mike Schneider: Gerald Stern (1925-2022)
In a flashy white-straw hat, leaning on his bright red metal cane, step-by-step silently making his way to a seat at the podium, Stern commanded the audience without a word.
Sharon Fagan McDermott: On Time Passing
I wander through the rusting bulk
of Carrie Furnace and reach toward the ghosts of
Eastern European men who worked with fire
and molten ore for pennies a day to build the Empire
Gary Fincke: The Double Negatives of the Living
I could talk
Two hours past midnight with
My father in the steelworker
Idiom of his city.
Gary Fincke: The Local Cemetery
Says she has purchased space
In the Garden of Dreams,
Which, so far, leaves me out
Mel Packer: Angie’s Place
Where back in the corner, there’s always some guy in a Pirates ballcap with skin like an old leather shoe who’s nursing the cheapest beer on tap….
Ellen McGrath Smith: Good Friday, Fernhill Dump
Standing, a girl-boy, on the junked car in the dump,
some other kids across the dump standing on their cars
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Pittsburgh
When I was a child,
I used to hear of this faraway place
where my people came to drown
themselves in search of America.
Michael Simms: Black Brick, Yellow Brick
I will die in Pittsburgh on a beautiful day…
Michael Simms: Scarf
The old man and the blonde woman smiled and waved at me, and I felt a surge of gratitude to be among such decent people in this lovely city in a dark time when the light of kindness seems so rare.
Rick Campbell: Archeology
I have come a thousand miles for this. J&L’s ruins, a gravel plain on the Ohio’s west bank. There’s little left but an archeology of memory—smokestacks, ovens, foundry, smelter, slag. … Continue reading
Robert Gibb: Worker, Steel Mill
Photograph by W. Eugene Smith, c. 1955 . Bug-eyed in those glare-filled goggles, He’s gauntleted and cassocked, garbed To be garbed in fire, which forms a lake On the floor … Continue reading
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