Wyandotte is the name of a woolen mill that ran in my home town, next to my school playground,m when I was a kid

WYANDOTTE

Big, old, brick mill building
Down the steep ravine.
Across the dirty river
From the tarmac playground
Of the school I attended
As a kid-this was the’50’s,
And they made wool,
Big, big rolls of wool;
You could see it being reeled in
From the looms, if you looked
Into the picture windows
At the end of the building.
Big, big rolls: you could tell
What color they were weaving
By the dye they dumped
Making the dirty little river
A toxic, sludgy, oily rainbow.
When the boilers blew off steam
A pipe near the big round chimney
Would roar, belching white, wet clouds,
And when they cleaned the wool,
The air was a yellowish miasma
Of poisonous, evil smelling fog.
The nuns still let us out at recess,
Even though it was hard to breathe,
And sometimes hard to see.
A little fog shouldn’t bother anyone,
And besides, that smell was money
That put food on some kids’ tables.
We could watch the water
That sometimes spilled
Over the big concrete dam
At the front of the mill.
After a storm would come
Lots of debris and branches.
Once I remember
A stray telephone pole
Teetering at the edge.
We watched it all recess,
And when we went back to class
It still hadn’t make up its mind
Whether it was going or staying.
But the best time for watching
Was early spring, when upriver
Ice was breaking up. Big white floes
Would cascade over the dam
And make a deafening thunder
As they broke up on the rocks below.
The economy closed the mill
Shortly after I left that school
It was closed for a good long time,
And finally refurbished and repurposed.
Today it makes nothing. It houses
Geezers and other useless antiques.
The old mill gives me no warm feelings.
When it was a mill, I never saw
Anyone inside, entering, or leaving it.
They say people worked there,
But you couldn’t prove it by me.
Sometimes I think it just ate the people
Who were supposed to work there,
And crapped out the wool-
Big, big rolls of it .

-Chip Bergeron
November 17, 2014