Ironbound Testament (version 2)

Intro

Sand mold cracked where the pattern board used to sit

Grandfather's initials pressed in the rim of it

Furnace breathes orange like a throat that won't quit

Every gate in this county remembers his grip

Verse

Foundry floor at four, the ladle's already glowing

Pour it slow or it splits, that's the first thing worth knowing

He taught me the temper before he taught me my letters

Said molten don't lie, it just finds where you're weathered

Forty years on that line, hands wrapped like a boxer

Scar across his forearm shaped like a river crosser

Made the trellis for the bridge past the coal yard bend

Said a good cast outlives the men who tend it

I stood where he stood, breathing the same black smoke

Watched the metal go liquid, watched it learn how to choke

down into the shape we carved it centuries ago

Same pattern, same fire, same ash on the floor

Boss called us numbers but the iron called us kin

Every plate stamped with a name that never got in

the papers, the ledgers, the framed photograph wall

Just the gates still standing after all of it falls

Chorus

I was born in the pour, cooled hard in the mold

Every scar on my arm is a story retold

Iron don't forgive but it never forgets

I'm the testament standing when the fire is set

Verse

Plant shut down in oh-nine, robots took the ladle

Foreman cried in the lot, said the craft ain't stable

But my uncle kept a torch running out the garage

Welding rebar for the highway, no permit, no badge

Said the skill is the deed, they can't repossess it

Poured a railing for the church where they used to bless it

Free of charge, just for the sound of the choir

Told me legacy's the only thing louder than the fire

I took contracts nobody wanted downtown

Cast the fence around the lot where they tore the block down

Kids play basketball now where my mold used to sit

Don't need my name on it, just need it to fit

Twenty years from now some boy touch that rail

Feel the weld line rough like a scar, like a trail

He won't know my hands but he'll know what they made

That's the only kind of monument that don't fade

Chorus

I was born in the pour, cooled hard in the mold

Every scar on my arm is a story retold

Iron don't forgive but it never forgets

I'm the testament standing when the fire is set

Bridge

Found out later the gate I cast at nineteen

Held the yard where they locked my brother between

concrete and sentence, ten years behind that steel

Same hands that shaped the cage shaped what he'd feel

I don't carry that guilt like a stone in my chest

I carry it like temper, like the iron knows best

that what holds a man in can hold a man up too

depends who's pouring, depends what's true

Outro

Pattern board's retired, hangs above my door

Dust in the grooves where his initials wore

I don't need the furnace lit to feel the heat

The testament's finished. The testament repeats.