September 3, 2012

Today is Labor Day, a time to remember the worker, the people who make things, who keep the world together, construct ordinary objects we wear, and handle, and use, and take for granted.  Also, a time to remember that a good portion of the world's work is unpaid labor, the daily tasks, mostly of women, who grow food or fish for the household, who clean, and fix, and raise the children, who teach, and carry water, and make a place that is home, even in the harshest conditions, even in the face of despair, or they move and try to start a new life, following the work men do, the paid work, because no matter what work is paid for, their work is the same and always needing to be done.  No matter what kind of work is done, today is for remembering it, for being grateful for it, not only for the fact of it being done, but for the need to do it, the work that makes a place we can call home and all the treasures we keep there, all the memories.

The poem today is one I have used before but today it seem appropriate to remember that everything around us, the house we live in, and all it contains, from the simplest thing to the most complex, is like this Shirt . . .

Shirt

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.

Robert Pinsky

  
So much associated with just one article, just a shirt, I tried to think of all the people who would make a book, of which I have so many, but my imagination failed me.  Paper and binding and printing and all the people whose hands touched all of those things and their parts and their raw materials, so many people to make the everyday things that surround us all.  And all those intangible things, that work unseen, telephone, television, Internet, it boggles the mind.  And so I am grateful today for all the work and all the workers, and celebrate the ingenuity of the human spirit to create so many things, to work out our future.  There will always be more creators than those whose only will is to destroy things, it's how we survive and live through our days.  Bravo workers of the world, bravo to all of us!