I had an uncle who dreamtof being an entrepreneurbut settled into industrial work.Like a factory conveyer belthe became nothing morethan an instrument of the process.He drove rigs filled with someentrepreneur’s products,hours upon hours, a dull droneabiding. He never had wealth.But unlike the CEO he hadtime to bring a rigover Colorado highlands,pull it onto the shoulder,and quell its black exhaustin a scape of gemstone blues,crystal lakes mirroringglacier snowcaps — time to stepdown not into a stalled lifebut one delivered herein God’s cupped hands.
Industrial Work
Crystal Simone Smith
~for Ray Foddrell
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- September 6, 2022
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“Industrial Work” from DOWN TO EARTH: by Crystal Simone Smith.
Published by Longleaf Press on May 11, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Crystal Simone Smith.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Crystal Simone Smith is a poet, indie-publisher, and educator. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, Down To Earth (2020), Running Music (2014), and Routes Home (2014). She co-authored, One Window’s Light, A Collection of Haiku, edited by Lenard D. Moore (2017), which won the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award for Best Haiku Anthology. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Prairie Schooner, POETRY Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Frogpond, and Modern Haiku. In 2020, she received a Duke University Humanities Unbounded Fellowship. She writes poetry about the human condition and social change.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
University of North Carolina Press
"There’s such intimacy and such depth of feeling in Crystal Simone Smith’s remarkable book, Down to Earth that one could almost overlook the incredible formal rigor that also guides and holds these poems. Where a lesser poet would make an airless box, Smith uses her deep understanding of both human and poetic form to make a world. People live, love, and struggle within the formal confines of a brutal world that is also luminous beyond all our expectations. I aspire to Smith’s mastery of line and clarity of vision. In this book, the past is always rising up to meet us and remind us that the past really isn’t past at all. We are always making and remaking it."
— Gaby Calvocoressi
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