Elegy for the Smokehouse Workers

Author: Tess Ezzy

The city forgets, but the bricks remember,

lungs filled with the dust of another man’s wealth.

Your laughter dissolved into smoke each September.

Sweetness clung bitter, a constant ember,

work was survival, not fortune or health.

The city forgets, but the bricks remember.

Names fade to whispers, fragile as timber,

time silences hymns you once sang to yourself.

Your laughter dissolved into smoke each September.

I press my hand to the wall as a limber

prayer, hearing echoes of ghost-ridden breath.

The city forgets, but the bricks remember.

Grief burns slow, not a spark but a cinder,

memory carried like shadow and stealth.

Your laughter dissolved into smoke each September.

So I write you in ink, a living ember:

no elegy can restore what you left.

The city forgets, but the bricks remember.

Your laughter dissolved into smoke each September.

Tess Ezzy is a poet and fibre artist whose work explores place, memory, and ecological kinship. She has published in academic and creative journals and is working on  her first novel.