White Heat

White Heat

The dawn is a smear of grey, the Thames a soot‑lined scrawl,
yet somewhere beyond the cobbles, a furnace sighs and swallows the pall.
Its iron heart convulses, a living coal‑sky,
spreading an invisible warpaint of blinding white‑heat across the day.

In a half‑lit forge behind a weather‑worn iron door,
the old‑world clank of hammer and anvil rings reborn.
Black‑eyed, black‑handed folk pull steel, stitch it to life,
turning the raw, the rough, the untamed into hymns of bright, white‑heat.

The candle‑light in the quiet of this western lane is brightened,
by shards that explode with a painful, brilliant flare,
as though the very ether had taken up the tempest of the sun and poured it
into the furnace, spilling molten ambition through a chipped cast‑iron cup.

The heat rises like a martyr’s wake, a white tempest of molten sand,
soft above the blaze, fierce as the flicker in a grandad’s fire‑pitted chest,
where he once clattered brass for a brass band, a song that could fill a whole boomerang‑blown bus stop.

White‑heat, some say, is the fury that consumes a miscreant's soul,
when a heart is summoned, emboldened, to a purpose so official,
it keeps the world’s iron in the motion again,
so the delicate silvers of the old mills stay warm.

Heat whispers through the narrow streets, a secret in a breath,
a colourless feeling that satisfies the crowd’s hungry sighs,
an invisible tide that calms the steam‑lifted rattling in the harbour,
and ends with a quiet, yet unfathomable, hiss.

In the end, the white‑heat, alive, beating, in the depths of a London block,
is a metal‑beaten north, a safety glass in the tempest of dark,
where each soul attempts to find its freckled, glowing line for a nudge into being.