Home > Poetry Magazine > Consecration

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

Consecration

By Susan Stewart b. 1952 Susan Stewart

The man in the yellow hard hat,

the one with the mask

across his nose and mouth,

pulls the lever that turns

the great arm of the crane up

and over and sideways

toward the earth;

then the wrecking ball

dangles crazily,

so delicately, like a silver fob

loosened from a waistcoat pocket:

shocking to see

the dust fly up and the timber

sail up, then so slowly

down, how the summer air

bristles with a hundred splinters

and the smallest is a splintered flame,

for it takes so many lengthening

erratic movements to tear away

what stands between the sidewalk

and the bell tower,

where the pigeons now rise

in grand indignant waves

at such poor timing, such

a deaf ear toward the music;

in this way the silence

between hand and lever is turned

into a ragged and sorely lifted

wing: the wrecking ball lurches

in a narrowing arc until only

the dust resists—the rest

comes down, story by story,

and is hauled off in flatbed trucks.

Meanwhile the pedestrians come

and go, now and then glancing

at their accurate watches.

Gradually, the dust

becomes the rose light

of autumn.

But one evening a woman

loses her way as she’s

swept into a passing wave

of commuters and she

looks up toward the perfectly

empty rectangle

now hanging between

the rutted mud and the sky.

There along the sides

of the adjacent building,

like a set for a simple

elementary school play,

like the gestures of the dead

in her children’s faces,

she sees the flowered paper

of her parents’ bedroom,

the pink stripes leading

up the stairs to the attic,

and the outline of the claw-

footed bathtub, font

of the lost cathedral of childhood.

Biography

In an interview at the University of Pennsylvania, Susan Stewart said that her primary goal as a poet is “to get people to read more slowly, and to reread, and to read a whole book and go back to the beginning of the book and see connections.” Her writing can be startlingly clear, while at the same time—in the words of the MacArthur Foundation, on the occasion of presenting her with a “Genius Award”—it makes “strange and . . .

Continue reading this biography