Poem: Rising Steam

I started working in the pharma industry in early 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning. The facility where I was employed was located a convenient 2-minute drive away and was a major hub of COVID-19 vaccine R/D and manufacturing. I’m still in the industry, and while I’m no longer at that particular facility, my time there has been finding its way into some recent poems. Here’s one of them.

Rising Steam

I swiped my badge at the employee doors, 
pinched the mask just above the nose—

Enter these star-bright hallways, 
where white-gowned bodies
mix liquids and powders, 
distill pharmaceutical elixirs.

Come here past the long vial lines
and the labcoat rooms,
past where the medicine-makers 
toil in fluorescent ether,

yes, and look—see the vacant cubicles,
the hall of empty chairs,
the printers clattering like sheets of rain,
the nameplate spaces where once were names.

Some have left. Some plague has taken. 
Some will never be back again. 
But where we are, in the vault of the future, 
time is measured by the strength of the cure.

Sickness is outside, yes, and inside as well,  
a coughing echo, a shadow in the corner. 
Keep your distance, keep breathing, 
we’re in a plague-race, keep working,

bring the cart of pharmaceutical recipes, 
the compliant files of industry, 
scan, review, sign-off, record, route 
the procedures, update the method, keep out 

tiredness, the creeping stress, return at night, 
return in the morning, stay late, 
production is waiting, the clients are waiting, 
vaccine creation and patients are waiting,

and there, see the factory steam pluming
above this concrete and steel, sunlit red
and reaching skyward, grasping 
to make sense of all that is happening—

I swiped my badge to enter the building. 
The pressure was on. The steam was rising.