Catawba Cotton Mill, 1908 Poem by David Wojahn

Propping his tripod, Hine remembers
Childhood snowfall in Wisconsin,
Flakes careening in prairie wind,

A red sleigh skimming a frozen lake,
Curlicued breath-mist of two dappled drays.
But this is a blizzard of cotton dust

From the looms & thirty thousand spindles,
Gauze-air, whirlwind of innumerable floaters.
The thermometer reads one hundred & three.

& for these seven ten-year-olds, childhood
Is six ten-hour shifts & on the seventh day
They rest, heads nodding over hymnbooks,

The drone of temperance & hellfire.
But this is din, not drone, the spindles'
Manic prayer wheels, the doffers

& the "little piecers," skittering on hand & knee
Beneath the clatter of the looms,
Patrolling for clumps of cotton waste.

This is weaver's cough and "mattress maker's fever,"
The mad percussive shivaree & glossolalia.
But then, for this moment, it ceases.

The foremen have gathered their doffers
& stilled the looms & spindles—
Six boys, a lone girl. The foreman

Adjusts his derby, pointing them toward
the cyclop-eye: Hine's 5 x 7. They are ordered
To look solemn, as if they could look

otherwise. Pulled slide, the flash pan
Dusted with power, the sizzle as the room
Erupts in light. Where the punctum?

Where the studium? To end your life
At twenty-five or thirty. Missing fingers,
Mangled hands, to walk somnambulant

To a sullen dormitory bunk, picking
Cotton shavings from your hair,
Mattress ticking spat onto a rude pine floor.

But Hine has set his flashpan in its case,
Broken down his tripod. Fiat Lux.
Hine gathers his work & faintly smiles

Adjusting his bowler & making a fist, as if
To attest that in this foul rag & sweatshop,
In this charnel house of ceaseless

Motion, his lens might render
One fugitive instant of dignity. Light
Is required, wrote Hine, light in floods.