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Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
-
for the 43 members of
-
Hotel
Employees and Restaurant Employees
Local 100, working at the Windows on the World
restaurant,
who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade
Center
-
Alabanza.
Praise the cook with a shaven head
- and a tattoo on his shoulder that said
Oye,
-
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from
Fajardo,
-
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
-
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
-
glimmering white to worship the dark
saint of the sea.
- Alabanza.
Praise
the cook's yellow Pirates cap
-
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his
plane
-
that flamed into the ocean loaded with
cans for Nicaragua,
-
for all the mouths chewing the ash of
earthquakes.
- Alabanza.
Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
-
even before the dial on the oven, so that
music and Spanish
- rose before bread. Praise the bread.
Alabanza.
-
-
Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven
flights up,
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like Atlantis glimpsed through the
windows of an ancient aquarium.
-
Praise the great windows where immigrants
from the kitchen
-
could squint and almost see their world,
hear the chant of nations:
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Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana,
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Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
- Alabanza.
Praise the kitchen in the morning,
-
where the gas burned blue on every stove
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and exhaust fans fired their diminutive
propellers,
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hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
-
or sliced open cartons to build an altar
of cans.
- Alabanza.
Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime
-
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
- Alabanza.
Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
-
who worked that morning because another
dishwasher
-
could not stop coughing, or because he
needed overtime
-
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a
family
-
floating away on some Caribbean island
plagued by frogs.
-
- Alabanza.
Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
- and sang to herself about a man gone.
Alabanza.
-
-
After the thunder wilder than thunder,
-
after the shudder deep in the glass of
the great windows,
-
after the radio stopped singing like a
tree full of terrified frogs,
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after night burst the dam of day and
flooded the kitchen,
-
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness
like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
-
like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if
the dead cannot tell us
-
about the bristles of God's beard because
God has no face,
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soul I say, to name the smoke-beings
flung in constellations
-
across the night sky of this city and
cities to come.
- Alabanza
I say,
even if God has no face.
-
- Alabanza.
When
the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
-
two constellations of smoke rose and
drifted to each other,
-
mingling in icy air, and one said with an
Afghan tongue:
-
Teach
me to dance. We have no music here.
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And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
-
I will
teach you. Music is all we have.
from
Alabanza: New & Selected Poems |
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