Bricks at sunrise

Workmen wake before the sun.  When it rises, they lean into it and wipe their muddy brows.  These endless days (though the days clearly have beginnings--this much the men have seen) turn their forearms to leather, their fingernails caked with crescents of dirt and cement and clay, their boots splattered permanently with the same.  A low grumble, a clatter, a hissing, and the shrill, penetrating, echoing warning sound of machinery going backward as well as toward.  The birds can't compete, they go back to sleep; the morning has been taken by the workmen, it belongs to them.