Recording of this poem is here.

“Know I well the source of metals/


Know the origin of iron.”

Runo 9, Kalevala

BEHIND

© Jane Piirto. All rights reserved.

Here we are, Michael and I

reading Wendell Berry nature poems

from A Timbered Choir

on Jasper Knob in Ishpeming

on a Sunday morning in August.

Isn’t it peaceful?

Seeing woods stretching to the horizon,

an old iron mining town nestled below,

we sit among striated jaspillite outcrops

with sun and blue sky.

Behind us lies

the biggest manmade footprint

ever made in the state of Michigan,

bigger than the Great Wall of China,

bigger than the pyramids,

the open pit iron mine, Tilden,

its flat skyline above the green forests.

Over Lake Angeline trucks clank,

prehensile giant silhouettes

on the anomalous horizon.

The monsters dump offal from conveyer belts,

ore magnetized into pellets

to make the autos to make America what it is,

earth turned inside out to yield

a garden of iron for bridges and girders.

Behind our backs rises a barren red mountain,

a landfill without odor or gulls,

pebbled, bouldered cliffs so steep

mountain goats or llamas could not get foot.

Beyond that skyline in back of us

the gouged pit is miles across

a crater that goes deeper than Lake Superior

with ore-boat sustenance for Pittsburgh’s steel mills–

far down there–slanted roads and ribbons

of magenta and stark gray.

They will go down another half a mile

in the next twenty years,

the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company says

on official tours.

No photos permitted.

The full time digging casts dull yellow light

on cloud bottoms all night long.

Daily blasting shakes the woods—

the lakes, rivers, trees, deer,

bear, squirrels, fish—

every noon at 12:15 p.m.,

(an old mining tradition—

blasting during lunch break)

even today. 

This quiet Sunday.

God, how can the sun shine

without regard and innocent

on this green pastoral foreground,

while in the background all devastation

proclaims the necessary victory of mines?