based on a photo by Cliff Feulner, First Prize,
LIFE MAGAZINE international competition, 1973

Suffering is cheap as bricks—
red dust on the children's faces
in this photograph, their pinched smiles
still turned up in wonder at the ochre clouds
where the sun's circular blade
hangs over bulldozed earth.
Boys bright and ignorant as sparrows
of their commonness, the manhood
they will settle into, the arms
of the dark-skinned workman
who bears down on an iron lever,
kicking something distant into life.
Settle like a building descending
into a sigh of brick dust.
Is it suffering that fells in a day
the stacked offices that hand on hand
built over freezing months,
as acrobats with saws roped to a tree
bring it down on the last
afternoon of a hundred years?
The lever lowers a rusted winch—
enormous, inverted, cruciform
against the sunlit dust's sulfurous billows.
The boys are young enough to think it joy
that dismantles everything. Their thin cheers
ring off the sides of the coal-black dumpster
where they pick through spars of wood
that once were windows and doors.