Today, January 10 is the birthday of poet, Philip Levine who was born in Detroit in 1928. After working in advertising and hating it, he got a job in the auto plants and realized that the workers didn't have a voice. So he decided to speak for them in his poetry. In one of his collections, Mercy, come these last lines from the poem, "Drum:"

The slow light of Friday morning in Michigan,
the one we waited for, shows seven hills
of scraped earth topped with crab grass,
weeds, a black oil drum empty, glistening
at the exact center of the modern world.