Philip Levine - Growth lyrics

In the soap factory where I worked when I was fourteen, I spoke to no one and only one man spoke to me and then to command me to wheel the little cars of damp chips into the ovens. While the chips dried I made more racks, nailing together wood lath and ordinary screening you'd use to keep flies out, racks and more racks each long afternoon, for this was a growing business in a year of growth. The oil drums of fat would arrive each morning, too huge for me to tussle with, reeking of the dark, cavernous kitchens of the Greek and Rumanian restaurants, of cheap hamburger joints, White Towers and worse. They would sulk in the battered yard behind the plant until my boss, Leo, the squat Ukrainian dollied them in to become, somehow, through the magic of chemistry, pure soap. My job was always the racks and the ovens - two low ceilinged metal rooms the color of sick skin. When I slid open the heavy doors my eyes started open, the pores of my skull shrivelled, and sweat smelling of scared animal burst from me everywhere. Head down I entered, first to remove what had dried and then to wheel in the damp, raw yellow curls of new soap, grained like iris petals or unseamed quartz. Then out to the open weedy yard among the waiting and emptied drums where I hammered and sawed, singing my new life of working and earning, outside in the fresh air of Detroit in 1942, a year of growth.