Crude Revisions

Chris Ellery

July 6, 2025

Homer, sing your Siren as the humming power

of a guzzling engine, Charybdis as a deepwater rig 

spewing crude into the sea like Polyphemus 

vomiting wine and bits of men.

Dante, pilgrim, how in your darkest dreams

could you ever conceive for a circle of Hell

the flame-tipped towers, cauldrons, 

and serpentine pipes of Jamnagar and Houston? 

Won’t you come again on your bony horse, 

knight of la Mancha, and joust this time 

with dragon pumps and demon derricks to save 

the air and earth from the sorcery of Petromagus?

Dear William Blake, beloved master, may 

your dawn-eager angels come today, not for 

the sooty sweeps of industrial London, but for 

the ginzels and worms of the oil patch. 

Heȟáka Sápa, what did you see among the ones 

they slaughtered at Wounded Knee if not black rain 

falling on the graves of your grandfathers 

in a future of diesel and plastic?

Chris Ellery taught world literature at Angelo State University for 31 years before his retirement in 2021. Two of his maternal uncles were killed in separate oil field accidents. His most recent collection of poems is One Like Silence.