1.

Sometimes the chimney was hot or alight.

They sent us up anyway, mostly naked.

At night we, sleeping black,

dreamt of the bakers on Lothbury,

of tight flues and endless winding.
The first time Jonny went up,

there was not even four years behind him.

He was up while the chimney was cold,

before the morning fire was lit. His skinny limbs,

cramped, waited for the mason’s cutting tools.
Luck for the bride who sees us perhaps.

But we are black and blind with falling soot.

We are burnt and scraped, our knees

set to fire with brine and brush

to harden our small hearts.
In the fairy tales, the sweep finds love

with a porcelain shepherdess.

After May day, we are turned from the table

to which we return, for the world gifts us

only sack cloth and ashes.


2.

there is no cap coarse enough

to keep the soot from eye or mouth

No talisman of brass cap badges

to shame the master who sends them up

to fall from roofs and chimneys
to lodge  in flues and suffocate

Whose son has fire set under him

his heels pricked to mend his pace

This is the cold fate of he who is alone

whose mother has died, left his body 
for the world to take and make coal

and whose back is bent in youth

his scrotum set to eat itself away

we die knowing what is denied us

air and love, a clean wanting
we fall, we hope, to something warm

that union that sought us out

first as fire now as ash

has left us invisible, sooty faced

only grace lets us fall