Mansley’s Making

After Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant

Tell me how it felt
to strike the Earth
in pieces, to feel
each limb and lobe
and ligament
bounce across the
land’s barren back.

Did you like it? The
freedom and pain of
it all? The sudden stop?

How strange it must
be - reduced to several
where one once stood -
like heads of chickens
lying slackjawed on the
slaughterhouse floor or
shards of glass painting
a vase’s ghost or the
jagged tooth of a shark
sunken in the deep or the
pages of letters that
managed to survive
the fire Sylvia set
in the wastebasket.

In Rockwell the children
gather screws in the
field where the giant
once stood - what at
the time seemed
insurmountable now fits
into a new generation’s
small, curmudgeonly palms.
​
I sit, waiting.
Soon the man will put
himself back together.