Friday, June 15, 2012

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.

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