Ode To A Carton Assembly Machine

            A dust-streaked yeoman mechanism, thee.

            A loud and stolid juggernaut for card.

            And many boxes you have caused to be.      

            You assemble cartons. Sharp cornered and hard.

            The cherubim, they supplicate your frame,

            and tend to cardboard going out and in.

            Their ears tender to your whirrs and thunks.

            E’er vigilant to place the stacks within.

            Do they wonder from where the paper came

            as they scrutinize those corrugated chunks?

 

            But there are many cartons needed still.

            Click and whirr and crash to your heart’s content.

            You disregard the items meant to fill

            containers which you made and didn’t rend.

            Box on! Dear thing. You lodge no living plaint.

            With just a variation in your hoot,

            the chorus brains. Yours is not to think.

            We’re the worry. Without AI, you wait

            to seal the bottom with metallic clink.

            Shove one with other down a polished chute.

 

            Floor-bolted, hissing, clunking modern truth.

            You’re the crucial midwife of industry.

            Within a corner’d warehouse; you- a squarish booth.

            Since everything needs boxes, dontcha see?

            The dust of trees, stamped with aniline print,

            folded by your glue-perfume’d arms.

            The consumer world awaits the fruit of thine.

            Made each three seconds. Shoved forth with a dint.

            A constant, corrugated string of charms.

            Spinning and bouncing down the roller line.

 

            You’re cherished, despite the noise and the fumes.

            Steadfast, you challenge, like Rosie of lore.

            The paces defined by the vapor you exude.

            Sharp cornered challenge- Gauntlets to the floor.

            The aroma! Like a hundred crafters,

            with the requisite hundred glue guns plugged in.

            Heads filled with dreams. The air thick with dope.

            The musical beat lifting the rafters.

            All to produce just the fumes and the din?

            Or to realize their bedazzled hopes?

 

            O prosaic sheen! Your full-time arms, they try.

            Quick and gleaming, they never hear avast.

            Cartons curried. O! Those arms make cartons fly!

            What a flurry! Damn! You make boxes fast.

            For the morning load, opened with a jerk?

            Or the hoi polloi? The earning/spending ring?

            To decorate the hillside with your work?

            Whither do you make? Why create these things?

           

            Why, to garner space, and place some stuff within.

            That which you braid is made for openin’.