By Fred Voss, with image by Peter Kennard
At my morning break I walk out into the parking lot in back of the factory and sit
in my car
and turn on the radio for news
bombs fall on Gaza as I bite into an apple
and think of the sun on the tree
where it ripened
a man on my radio talks of melting icecaps and falling civilizations
Trump smiles at himself in the mirror as he waits to step into the White House again
and Europe trembles at the thought
as the man on the radio says goodbye to democracy
I swallow juice from the apple sweet
as the kiss of my wife when she whispered goodbye into my ear in the dark this morning
as I lift the egg salad sandwich she made me off the wax paper on my lap
I am with her
she is a baby watching her mother pick dates in Indio, California
after leaving dustbowl Texas
in 1940
so she can meet me and marry me under a eucalyptus tree 50 years later
I am as far away from the dark shadows of the factory as I can get in my mind
as the sun floods my car and I turn off the radio and turn on my Beethoven CD
to the last movement of his great Ninth
where you can hear humankind cry out that it will never stand
for tyranny
and I dream my next volume of poetry
will someday begin to nudge the world an inch closer
to justice
and the clock ticks down on my work break
and people in Detroit stare at the murals of Diego Rivera who dreamed of workers
someday rising to power
and I swallow a big bite of chocolate for dessert
and I am back in Whittier, California with a chocolate bunny and an Easter egg hunt
at the age of 4
when finding an Easter egg felt like the most important thing
on Earth
then I switch back on the news to make sure they haven’t dropped
the atom bombs yet
and the timeclock buzzer blares from the factory ending my breaktime
so I head back into the factory to stand at my machine
where my world is no bigger than a blueprint
and a block of steel
and all I can do to shape that world
is try to shave that steel
down to one thousandth of an inch
perfection.
