*
Poet Mike Steffen writes: “I recently watched the 1945 MGM movie with Judy Garland Meet Me in Saint Louis, which piqued my interest in the 1904 World Fair there, called “The Louisiana Purchase World Fair.” I came across this colossal statue of the Roman god of the forge, Vulcan, while browsing the Internet for info on the Fair. At one point, the huge statue, the largest free-standing iron-cast statue in the world, lay in its cast sections in the Birmingham fairgrounds (after it had been returned from Saint Louis) and I came across the epigraph quote, “children would often play around the disassembled statue”. As it stands on its towering pedestal today on Red Mountain in Birmingham, the backside of the statue, in the classical Italian style, reveals the naked deity’s bare bottom, facing toward the suburb of Homewood, and there is apparently a song there sung as a joke, Moon Over Homewood.”

World Fair Vulcan
children would often play around the disassembled statue

Poet Mike Steffen

We fall to pieces sometimes.
Even the mighty forge god Vulcan.—
Raggedy Anns in their aprons scampered
over the sound perch of his aproned breast.

Brought home to iron-rich Birmingham
from the Saint Louis Expo, for unpaid
freight costs the statue had lost its spear.
He huckstered an ice cream cone, Heinz pickles…

His classical arrogance could not suit
the downtown ladies’ Christian societies.
Die-cast metal airplanes in children’s hands
zoomed over the small hills of his

yet again taken down bare ass.
     His new pedestal towers now on Red Mountain
to moon over Homewood: a local joke
to keep another world superlative’s

feet on the ground. Half-inch marbles
were once flicked across all 56 monumental feet
of the smith, for the up and down
in us all, to remind us where we’ve been.

— Mike Steffen

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