Two of my early poems were included in the anthology Working Hard For The Money: America’s Working Poor in Stories, Poems, and Photos from Bottom Dog Press. They are Radar, and Lions After Slumber.
Radar
There was a man
unraveling down the sidewalk along
the backside of the Capitol’s Rotunda
a man vexed
all in a wrangle
arm through a tattered vet jacket
holding a black phone receiver
talking loud trying to get through
to somebody…
but it was an old 50’s phone
frayed cord dangling from the mouthpiece–
it wasn’t connected
and no-one was listening.
There was a woman
whimsical and wiry as a homeless gypsy
worn red jacket and yellow scarves
radiating so bright
she’d be impossible to miss
unless that was your plan
smiled as I passed
caught that glint in my eye like
a hidden wavelength
called out behind me
How are you today? Yes you, you look alive!
and I am and wonder
how she knows…
an invisible beam
emanating between agents
secret in the wrong country.
There were three cadets
young white and true blue jogging by
in grey shorts neatly cut hair
innocent and clean as the sons
you’re supposed to have
chuckling between easy breaths
eyes like radar
scanning for what is out of place
on their tracking screens
light on we other three
circling the capitol looking
for a way in
and I
wondering will we show up as friend or foe.
Lions After Slumber
Poetry used to be worth the world, before cloistered
in academic circles, resplendent in literary silk, dead.
But in 1909, women of the Ladies Garment Union
pressed on against winter, scabs, prison
reciting Mask of Anarchy as they worked inside the
Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City:
Rise like lions after slumber, shake your chains
to earth…Ye are many, they are few!
When fire broke out in the rag bin, sweeping through
illegal floors with locked doors too high for the ladders
to reach, the New York World responded in lyric:
They jumped with their clothing ablaze…
they leapt with their arms around each other,
onto growing piles of the dead and dying.
When it was over, one hundred thousand marched
down Broadway, because it mattered,
because the twenty seven thousand killed on the job
every year at the turn of this great century
made silent poems of their lives, because Joe Hill
was charged with murder as he sang, lyrics inciting
the downtrodden to throw off their chains
as gospel hymns the slaves before—
and because his poetry mattered, he was executed
by firing squad in Utah, calling man, woman and child,
black and white, immigrants all, to do something
tangible, now.
Which Langston Hughes did in the 30’s,
wedding the poem to the world rather than the classroom,
calling to the people
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain…
Must bring back our mighty dream again…America!
Poetry must rise as a lion after slumber,
hunt game of import, roar with every stroke,
for we cannot matter to the world
if the world does not matter to us.