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Prayers of Steel by Carl Sandburg

Lay me on an an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.


Why I Am The Woman Who Made Friends With Electricity

When I was sixteen years old, and about to graduate from high school, it was a hot humid June afternoon and I was looking out of the classroom window at the sky. I could see that thunderstorms were beginning to build up. And just as school ended for the day, the rain began pelting down. I had to walk home from school.

I chose a short-cut that would get me out of the rain a moment or two sooner. This took me across a vacant lot, just a bunch of mud and weeds that hadn't been prepared for building yet. As I walked, I could feel the hair on my head begin to rise. Lightning is about to strike right where I'm walking! I ran, not because of fear but because of a reasoned decision to be elsewhere when it struck. The thunderclap from behind me knocked me sprawling into the mud, and left me partially deafened for a couple of days. But lightning had the chance to kill me, and it didn't, so that's not going to be how I go.

There was a science fiction short story I had read, by Fritz Leiber, called "THe Man Who Made Friends With Electricity". In it a man believes that the electricity in his house wiring is communicating with him. He buys a house on top of a high hill, because there's a large high-voltage electrical tower right next to the house. The static and crackling in the air around the tower also talks to him. It tells him that lightning is just "tame" electricity's wild cousins making mischief. It tells him that the telephone and all the power lines are all electrically communicating amongst each other. It tells him that some of the electricity in normal house wiring comes from generators far away, some in other countries. There's even Russian electricity around! He is horrified to know that there's Commie electricity in our wires. He sends a letter to the FBI about this, and they're going to have someone come talk to him soon. But there's a storm in the mountains that night, and high on the hilltop the power lines are muttering and sparking to themselves. He notices that his window is open, and he goes to close it to keep the rain out. As he walks over, the phone rings, and the phone itself leaps off the table and falls on the floor. The handset swings out as it falls, winding around his feet and making him trip and fall closer to the window. And a bolt of lightning flies in the open window and kills him. (He was about to rat out electricity to the FBI!)

I spend most of my adult life working with electrical devices - telephones, radio transmitters, power tools, and eventually computers. If you want to indicate that something uses electricity, you might draw little lightning sparks around it, which is how I got the "lightning" in my name. I can often coax electrical or mechanical devices to perform better when they malfunction. So having made friends with electricity when I was a teen makes me The Woman Who Made Friends With Electricity. And I'm not about to tell science-fiction stories to the law enforcers.