2
 

Fe

By: Luqmaan Fazal
Competition Year: 2013
Votes (2) | Comments (0)
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I am born.
From the womb of the Earth
They spit at my ugly form at birth.
Yet I am the ink of their revolutions,
Blotted across their greatest constructions.

I am young.
With hellish heat I’m tamed; the anvil
And the Hammer to break my will.
Rolled. Stretched. Quenched.
Purified by the oxygen lance I exit the furnace,
Chain myself to the concrete sleepers as I span miles over the surface
Unmoving as engines stampede over me. I was
Drawn into bolts that wove the hulls of Her Majesty’s navy,
Unwound in to the frames that define the Empire state,
Imbued into the cables that carry the Golden Gate and
Forged into the very dies and hammers that shape me.
The navigator’s needle, the slave’s sickle;
The conqueror’s canon; the fortress of the fallen.
I am the fall of nations. I am - their reconstruction.

I am old.
Wither and decay I must
As they laugh at my wrinkles of rust.
Onward time lingers,
And me –flakes between your fingers.
But remember:
As your cells gasp for air:
I am there.
Imagine li-Fe
Without-
Me.
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