Stripped bare to the waist we stood at our posts,
Working dumbly in time.
Outside the sun beats down ferociously on the tin roof.
Inside the peeling shed, the temperature unimaginable
Aided unmercifully by the heat of the butchered wood
And the safety helmets which comb sweat-sodden hair flat
In this furnace of misery.
The perspiration would drip, trickle and run
In rivulets like water from a sponge.
Wrists wiped across steaming russet faces worn sore,
Sinews and tendons pumping in time with the machines.
Muscles flexing across a dozen chests,
Wrestling logs from spinning blades.
And the noise! God the noise...
A dozen screaming machines stripping bark,
Shaping smooth the dead fingers of the trees,
Punctuated once by a school-leaver's screams,
His dead fingers falling with the wood shavings,
Blood running like sap from the wood.
The sap...that amber sticky mess drying on skin stained black.
Our hands becoming like the rough leather of the aprons
That swung from our weary hips, splinters trapped forever.
Every day we would slave thus.
And I, growing immune with time to the back-breaking work
Would fall into a swinging rhythm in this ceaseless chain
Of bloodied muscle chained to unwieldly logs of disheartening size.
I would bear the eternal hell of heat and noise,
For through it all I would catch sight of my friendly Blackbird
Who every day would perch on the logs
Outside the open doors of our roaring oven shed, watching me,
Coquetish head on one side, no doubt thinking that I was mad
To be slogging it out on such a lovely summer's day.
In return I would dream of being that bird
So as to fly far away from that wretched camp
Into the surrounding forest, there to find a shady spot
And listen to nothing save the rustling trees.
Sometimes it was not only the bird that thought me mad,
For my comrades in our sawdust-choked world
Would sometimes catch my silent far away smiles...
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