Two After Diego Rivera, by Michael Mintrom

Detroit Industry Murals, north wall detail, by Diego Rivera (Mexico) 1933

​Diego Rivera in Detroit 

Muscled workers like ballet dancers,
orange flames of the blast furnace,
chassis after chassis rolling out

beneath volcanoes, birds, godlike beings, 
impatient bosses. On a quiet afternoon
I’d drive there, enter that light-filled courtyard

step back in time, contemplate contrasts:
industry and beauty, body and mind, 
nightmare, dream. A century after Henry Ford,

River Rouge, the hunger march: Peace. 
Battles over socialism, wealth and art
buried. Here he looms

Rivera at the DIA, lively and bright, 
holding his mirror to modernity: 
Brilliant, miraculous, deadly.

Detroit Industry Murals, south wall detail, by Diego Rivera (Mexico) 1933

Rivera Reflection, 1933

We stand beside the night river. 
Who can catch starlight
without plunging in the ooze?

A hunger march ended with a riot,
four factory hands dead at River Rouge.
Henry Ford had blood on his boots.

Edsel from Grosse Point paid me to create 
“a tableau of the industrial life.”
I was elated. Day and night I painted

in sympathy for the dead.
Lost in mythologies, I chased
the mind that could forge from rock 

the curves of a Cadillac.
Came to respect a multitude,
engineers, immigrants, dancers,

in that city of masses,
assembly lines, wonder,
of naked mechanical power.

Michael Mintrom

Michael Mintrom lives in Melbourne, Australia. His poems have appeared before in The Ekphrastic Review, as well as other literary journals including Amsterdam Quarterly, The Blue Mountain Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, London Grip, The Metaworker, and Shot Glass Journal.