At An Abandoned Cement Factory

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In the piney woods, nothing else near,
the broken piers standing monoliths.
Tree limbs fork through openings
where high windows long ago let in
light to do work by.
                                 Walk through, past
chunks of concrete fallen, half buried.
There is only grass in scattered patches,
a blasted heath or meadow where nothing
remains.
                Everything has been smoothed
by wind and rain and made soft, rounded,
the harsh edges gone.
                                      Once, in Normandy,
we stopped to visit a Benedictine abbey
that had been pillaged and destroyed,
first by the Normans in the ninth century,
and then later, after the French revolution,
yet it remained in spirit.
                                         Towers, arches,
choir "where late the sweet birds sang."
We walked in the ruined cloister. It, too,
was abandoned, and indescribably beautiful,
in a time of apple-blossom, and sunlight,
and silence.
                        And here, in northern Michigan,
on the grounds of a forgotten cement plant,
there is a strong sense that these structures
were important once, and productive,
that men labored here, and contributed
something valuable, and then went home
to dinner, and to their wives and children,
before the long sleep overtook them.

Here, the outlines of that dream remain
in the weathered piers, the broken arches
that still reach up as if to grasp the sun.