Friederich Engels in Eighteen Forty-four
Arrived in Manchester, the English midlands,
To view his father’s factory there, and then
To chronicle the misery of the poor
And suffering in that prosperous city who
Had suffered from the imposition of
The revolution wrought by steam-powered
Factories for the cotton trade.  He also
Wrote about the river of the city:

“At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates,
The Irk, a coal-black, foul-smelling river
Full of refuse and debris…. In summer
Weather, a string of most disgusting, blackish
Pools are left to stand along the bank,
From whose depths a bubbling miasmatic
Gas emerges, giving forth a stench
That’s unendurable even on the bridge
Some forty-fifty feet above the ground.”

Yet not even such an ugly crime
Against the natural world disturbed the men
Who benefitted from the riches there.
Engels mentions that he said to one
Of them that he had never seen so ugly,
Ill-built, filthy, and unhealthy city.
The man, he said, listened quietly to
The end, and said at the corner where they parted:
“Yet there is a great deal of money
Made here now; good morning, sir!”

And let that be the epitaph for the stone
Where capitalism’s corpse is finally laid;
“Too bad we had to mutilate the earth—
But there was a great deal of money made.”