Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

all now are only names in peeling paint
checkered on bricks and falling signs.
The nearby houses are humbled now
with torn clapboards,
rot beneath the stage paint of shingles,
the cheap bluster of aluminum siding,
walls bloated, foundations shifted,
split into rat-cell studios for commuters.
Many are boarded-up, foreclosed.
No one remembers when mansard slate
and gable and cupola gleamed new,
when a smokestack with a man’s name on it
was a place arrived at as a good sign
of a continued paycheck.
Things that got made here,
kept getting made.