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Homage to the Day Laborers
Listen to this
poem!
By Mario Yedidia
Wrought in distant hotbeds of ancient civilizations;
Begot by lands that over the millennia sustained Mongol and Spaniard invasions
out of which vast nations
were born, countries
who in the 19th century history
forced to endure
the wrath of an American government intent on not blurring
but rather abolishing the line between democracy and empire
and siring
a wholly new free market beast;
Heirs to a feast of cultural lineages
whose age, breadth and scope far exceed
this country’s comparable eurocentric deeds;
Each morning I lie in bed on Dolores Street and listen as they build a garage
for the nice yuppie couple who lives next door.
Latinate and eight-toned,
from the prominence Papal Sees
and the creation of Tai-Chi
their verbal melodies
have mixed most naturally
with the sounds of manual labor,
And though an ocean of Pacific proportions separated them, I reason
that they must have looked much the same during harvest season,
bare feet and brown skin steeped in dirt and sweat
as they bent low and fanned
themselves to bring forth fruit from the land.
But the passage of time
be damned for today their hands
are still thick with working man’s grime
as they sit in front of the Kelly Moore store
on Cesar Chavez and wait to find work.
Today they roam Noe Valley and Pacific Heights in pickup trucks,
the cab crammed with three of four men,
or they rend two by fours and bend
paintbrushes to walls
amidst the calls
of Thurgood Mashall o.g.’s
under the sparse trees
of Bayshore Boulevard.
At night they’ll retire to restaurants
that flaunt
a species of their native cuisine
that the melting pot mutated and dream
over the burritos and potstickers and Coronas and Tsing-Daos of childhoods
in Jalisco and Hunan,
Canton and Culicán.
Their wives labor just as fiercely,
for while their spouses
work outdoors
they clean houses
for evermore
deep in the neighborhoods of the gringo and wy-go-ren
Or flip the longing they bleed
for their far-off seeds
into an enveloping maternity
for young American children absentee
professional parents whom they have been charged to care for,
This therefore is for Olga,
una señora de amor,
a soldier of resilience
who left four daughters
to subsist on Guatemalan waters
and the American dollars
she sent home and whose brilliance
and being expose the lie
that these words can live up to the gratitude I wish them to signify.
Óyeme Olga: el judío colombiano con pelo rubio quién tú
críaste
has found the namaste
in every lurch of the Jota Church
you protected me from,
every cumbia drum
you let me hear en el Parque Dolores
and today I write a chorus
for every aguacate you salted,
every grape you peeled,
for with them you sealed
my fate, y doy gracias desde mi corazón al tuyo.
Yet these lines of verse aim to transcend my small experience,
they are not meant to idealize truth
but rather realize it lyrically:
This is for immigrant men who live with chemically calloused hands and permanent
paint stains in the age of cyber technology.
This is for brown-skinned women who ride the 22 and 24 each day with white people
who can only conceive of the plight of their fellow passengers as abstractions
and whose forefathers dehumanized their fellow passengers with phrenology.
I ride the bus with those women’s children
who become American with every fly
Johnny Blaze or old school Tommy Hill jacket they buy
that was hewn
by their distant kinsmen in the womb
of a Shanghai or Ciudad Juarez sweatshop,
Who become American with every song they memorize
whose origin lies
in West African breakneck beats
modified for survival’s sake on
the decks of slave ships,
the fields of cotton plantations
and the Harlem streets,
And in those second generationers I see me:
I absorb Gift of Gab and Talib’s rhyme schemes
and mix them with a homage, ode or pindaric,
any way you slice it I’m a motherf*cking Homeric hip hop cleric
here to slice through verse that is generic
and pay honest homage to those day laborers,
And in fusing these nouns and verbs
and as I ride the bus I realize
that their immigrant, working class journey
is the living, breathing truth
out of which this country has constructed its mythological sooth-sayings.
So while it is the fate of this state
—like all that came before it and all that will come after—
to remain far from heaven,
yet with every piece of legislation like Prop 187
we flay ourselves and further betray
the satyrs
upon whose shoulders the weight
and future of our nation rest.
But I am not here merely to foment
a litany of stolen moments,
for we must do much more than retract
the Patriot Act
if we are to change the course of this purported meritocracy
where hypocrisy reigns
and I daresay a first step lies
in looking the next Chinese or Mexicano-American day laborer we meet squarely
in the eyes.
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