The Sword
(Found here ) I made the sword. Here in the fire I plunged the steel white hot bearing the beat of the apprentice’s hammers, one-two-three over and over on the steel bar -- over and over the firing the beating of hammers till the bar is dense with the struggle, and I bend it again and again. Over and over the pounding, the cutting, the bending, layer on layer the crude bar resists me. I have given it courage. It has held day and night against heat, against pounding. At last I have shaped it, hardened its edges. It becomes a mirror of my hand hardened in fire with the metal that resists and is beaten folded and beaten to the luster of the still pond that is windless that carries one gold curving branch in its center spread with the gold leaves of springtime and waiting to bring you this mirror, this hardness, this ardor of hammering home. ~Ann Stanford “[This] poem by the twentieth-century California poet depicts the making of a sword—a striking image that stands in tension with what Je...
