This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and retired professor of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
If you could choose anything, what would you do—or not do—on your very last day of work? After 47 hard years of working as a crane operator for Allegheny Ludlum, poet Paola Corso’s grandfather, Anthony Corso, refused to walk up any more city steps. Find out how his family surprised him in today’s poem “A Cigarette Butt on a Landing.”
Paola Corso’s award-winning books of fiction and poetry, including Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps, are set in her native Pittsburgh where her Italian immigrant family members were steelworkers. She is co-founder of Steppin Stanzas, a grant-awarding poetry and performance project celebrating Pittsburgh public stairways; a video, “On the Way Up: City Steps, City Immigrants,” and “Western Pennsylvania History, an essay on city steps. She’s proud to be included on Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s Literary Map. https://www.paolajocorso.com
Here’s to the hard workers in mills and factories, to bone-tired employees after long shifts who, in a city of stairs, climbed their way home. In her poem “A Cigarette Butt on a Landing,” Paola Corso asks us to look past youth climbing for exercise or beyond tourists stepping for city views. Instead, she wants us to consider narratives of the workers, including her grandfather, who climbed the steps day in and day out.
Here’s “A Cigarette Butt on a Landing” by Paola Corso
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Pick it up, toss it in the trash, pretty up city stairs for an annual trek.
Years ago the same Camel woulda been flicked by a mill hunk
taking his last drag as he climbed down to the factory gate.
What did he care about clean steps when he was a sooty shadow of a man
after his shift, pants and shirt the color of a charcoal sky, the color of factory lungs.
Now trekkers climb a yellow-brick road for views, for snapshots, for exercise,
for a lighter carbon foot when the bottom of his steel toe boots was black, his sole heavy.
Old-timers climbed steps before they were cool, before they were the destination. They climbed
to church and school, to a haircut and soda pop. And to a steel worker, steps were the route
to punch in and out, the route he didn’t want to take except on payday.
On my grandfather’s last night shift operating a crane before he retired,
my father and his brothers borrowed a Cadillac and drove him home at sunrise.
He wasn’t gonna climb up no stairs on his last day of work after 47 years
in a sweat cabin above open fire. He came home to a pancake breakfast,
to maple syrup, strips of bacon, black coffee. Home, an old destination. Home, a new route.
(Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps, Six Gallery Press, 2020)
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That was “A Cigarette Butt on a Landing” by Paola Corso.
Thanks for listening.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
