by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator
It is Monday, Labor Day, in the year 2015. While Labor Day is seen by many as the unofficial end of summer and a grand excuse to barbecue, it represents, in fact, so much more. Almost every improvement in the lives of American workers over the past century and a half has come about through the direct involvement of labor unions. (The forty-hour work week, paid sick leave and vacations, worker safety requirements, compulsory education for young people - and so much more.) Now, sadly, one political party in the United States appears hellbent on rolling back all of those gains and returning workers to the subhuman degradations that they endured back in the dark ages of American manufacturing.
Scott Walker and his union-busting Republican colleagues don't have the intellect or or the common decency to be ashamed of themselves, so it falls upon the rest of us to be ashamed for them.
The following poem by Robert Pinsky references the infamous fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in 1911 - a tragedy in which over one hundred and forty individuals -mostly women - working in an upper-story sweat shop lost their lives when fire swept through the building. They were locked in the workroom with no fire escapes - a time that modern Republican politicians regard fondly as "the good old days."
Unions are good things, they represent our humanity. Republican politicians, as a rule, represent our greed and our lesser selves. They are not good things.
Always look for the union label - and thank you Bernie Sanders for ensuring that every item in your campaign store is union made.
Shirt
by Robert Pinsky
Poetry Appreciator
It is Monday, Labor Day, in the year 2015. While Labor Day is seen by many as the unofficial end of summer and a grand excuse to barbecue, it represents, in fact, so much more. Almost every improvement in the lives of American workers over the past century and a half has come about through the direct involvement of labor unions. (The forty-hour work week, paid sick leave and vacations, worker safety requirements, compulsory education for young people - and so much more.) Now, sadly, one political party in the United States appears hellbent on rolling back all of those gains and returning workers to the subhuman degradations that they endured back in the dark ages of American manufacturing.
Scott Walker and his union-busting Republican colleagues don't have the intellect or or the common decency to be ashamed of themselves, so it falls upon the rest of us to be ashamed for them.
The following poem by Robert Pinsky references the infamous fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in 1911 - a tragedy in which over one hundred and forty individuals -mostly women - working in an upper-story sweat shop lost their lives when fire swept through the building. They were locked in the workroom with no fire escapes - a time that modern Republican politicians regard fondly as "the good old days."
Unions are good things, they represent our humanity. Republican politicians, as a rule, represent our greed and our lesser selves. They are not good things.
Always look for the union label - and thank you Bernie Sanders for ensuring that every item in your campaign store is union made.
Shirt
by Robert Pinsky
The back, the yoke, the yardage.
Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along
the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or
Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on
their break
Or talking money or politics while
one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to
the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist. The
presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The
needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The
infamous blaze
At the Triangle Factory in
nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in
the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no
fire escapes—
The witness in a building across
the street
Who watched how a young man helped
a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her
out
Away from the masonry wall and let
her drop.
And then another. As if he were
helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not
eternity.
A third before he dropped her put
her arms
Around his neck and kissed him.
Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her.
Almost at once
He stepped to the sill himself, his
jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as
he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray
trousers—
Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite,
“shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches
perfectly
Across the placket and over the
twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a
strict rhyme
Or a major
chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras.
The clan tartans
Invented by mill-owners inspired by
the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish
workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry:
MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt,
devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering
looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The
loader,
The docker, the navvy. The planter,
the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter
of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags
sweated in fields:
George Herbert, your descendant is
a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is
Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its
color and fit
And feel and its clean smell have
satisfied
Both her and me. We have culled its
cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated
bone,
The buttonholes, the sizing, the
facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail.
The shape,
The label, the labor, the color,
the shade. The shirt.
No comments:
Post a Comment