It is not a steely-eyed
egret nor heft of pelican but just a singing bird that catches
my fancy
from a balcony perched
across from pines lining the marina. Here I make watch of
another
shifting sky, distant buoy
sounding swells in the bay, common robin chiming in on the wind.
But this bird makes its
roost in the forked trunk, where branches droop heavy with
cones.
Like this robin, I try to
perfect a voice in the intimate language of birds, call back at
it,
parroting the rise and fall
of its wistful warbling, practicing the melodic whistling.
Everything readies for
something - above, wide wings of dark crows fan the horizon.
Below,
a ray steers clear of a row.
A dog splashes into the water, his boy crying for a lost oar.
Twilight settles on tapping
riggings and masts, breeze in the tinny chimes, spring in the
song.
Rosie
Times
“How do you know you
are going to die?”
I begged my
mother...With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no
longer make a fist.”~Naomi
Shihab Nye
My mother, born into the
flapper era, never bobbed
her hair, never sported
drop waist dresses with a cloche,
nor did she cover her
face with pancake and rouge,
lifting her skirt above
her knees in speakeasies
or on Gatsby verandas.
She came of age in World War II.
Draped in white
coveralls, hair wrapped in a red scarf
under a hardhat, clear
goggles shielding her amber eyes,
she welded Pressed
Steel’s boxcars outside Pittsburgh
like women in Toledo hauling Jeep parts to Ford lines,
like those assembling fuselages on bombers in Long Beach
or for Boeing’s Flying Fortresses in Seattle,
like women filing bullets for the Army,
or building ships at California’s Richmond docks,
like those feeding blast furnaces in steel mills,
sparks flying at the giant cauldrons of molten steel.
Liberty Girls~the
women on railroads, in shipyards,
as pipe fitters and riggers, bus drivers and mechanics,
like those shooting riveting guns or ferrying planes,
ratcheting with wrenches or lighting torches,
arms linked across America with the plains women,
with the farm women, the desert and mountain women,
with the city women, even with Marilyn Monroe,
who as Norma Jean, attached propellors to planes.
My mother never jumped
drunken in her clothes
into a fountain like F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s new women,
but she did drop,
donning her mail order rayon sheath,
from a rowboat into the
lake, belting out the high notes
of Indian Love Call at a
USO picnic. She learned
to love the night shift
as a blackout air warden
and became the woman who
I would later blast
for not pulling free
from my father’s fierce grip.
I have become the woman who no longer wonders
how I dared knuckle into
my own fist, raise it high
for rights in rallies
and marches for reason and right
because I had a mother
who dared give up a job
as a nursemaid for the
rail yard and factory,
relinquish the girdle to
the rubber drive, who never
threw off the helmet for
the apron, and went on
living as if she could
do anything~making
a fist.
~ Human Equity through Art
2014
Women of the Fields
--for
Dolores Huerte, UFW co-founder
who
declared her a born again Feminist at 83
The women of the
fields clip red bunches of grapes
in patches of
neatly tilled farmland in the San Joaquin,
clip sweet
globes they can no longer stand to taste -
just twenty
miles shy of Santa Cruz beach babies
in thongs,
Pleasure Beach surfers on longboards,
all the cool
convertibles speeding the Cabrillo Highway
women line as
pickers, back bent over summer’s harvest.
The campesinas labor
without shade tents or water buffalos,
shrouded in
oversized shirts and baggie work pants, disguised
as what they are
not, faces masked in bandanas under cowboy hats
in fils de
calzón-
the young one named Ester taken in the onion
patch
with the field boss’ gardening shears at her
throat,
the older one called Felicia isolated in the
almond orchard
and pushed down into a doghouse. The pretty
one, Linda,
without work papers, asked to bear a son in
trade
for a room and a job in the pumpkin patch,
Isabel, ravaged napping under a tree at the
end of a dream
after a long morning picking pomegranates, violación
de un sueño.
Salome on the apple ranch forced up against
the fence
as the boss bellowed his ecstatic Ave, Ave
Maria.
The promotoras flex
muscle in words, steal off into night
to meet
face-to-face to talk health care, pesticides,
heatstroke, rape,
meet to tally
accounts - forced to exchange panties for paychecks
in orchards, on
ranches, in fields, in truck beds - to speak out to
face
joblessness and
deportation to an old country, a new foreign soil.
Women of the
fields, like those before them, like those
who will trail
after - las Chinas, Japonesas, Filipinas -
to slave for
frozen food empires in pesticide drift,
residue crawling
along the skin, creeping into the nostrils
and pregnancies
it ends as they hide from La Migra
in vines soaked
in toxins or crawl through sewer tunnels,
across railroad
tracks, through fences to pick strawberries,
for this, this: la
fruta del diablo.
~Thomas Merton
Center’s The New
People 2014
What
About a Fight?
What is it that
balls a man’s fists into sudden rage,
jabbing and
blocking, body weaving and swaying -
a poker bet gone
bad, tiff over a last shot and beer,
wrong song on the
jukebox, something the other guy
said years ago to
the woman he didn’t marry anyway?
What is it, when the
brawl tumbles into the street,
rubberneckers
honking horns, grunting OohRah!
even when one face
is already kissing the pavement?
No Sugar Ray or Ali,
what drives the everyday Joe,
digs in so deep,
courses across scarred knuckles,
the broken tooth,
blackened eye, flattened nose?
They say my father
liked a fight. Was it his old juvie record
trumping
determination or hope, his annulled marriage
to a bigamist
collecting veteran’s checks, or layoffs at the mill
just before benefits
kicked in, a monotony of existence?
What of those of us
who years later toss and turn over
brutal thoughts that
won’t abate, still hearing the screech
of a police car
hitting the curb, the smack of the body
slamming the
asphalt? They say my father liked a fight.
And as they carted
him off to jail again, what of the wife -
my mother behind the
window’s bent blind slat
who, as the cruiser
takes off, she thinking I am not there
to hear her own
wounded spirit sigh, says:
“Finally, maybe now
I can get a good night’s sleep.”
~Arroyo
Literary Review Pushcart Prize Nomination;
PEN Oakland Fightin' Words Anthology.
Andrena Zawinski is an award winning poet and educator, born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA who has made Alameda, CA her home. She has authored several collections of poetry: Something About (Blue Light Press, San Francisco) received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Traveling in Reflected Light (Pig Iron Press, Youngstown) was a Kenneth Patchen competition winner in poetry. Her chapbooks are Taking the Road Where It Leads (Poets Corner Press Honors Publication), Zawinski's Greatest Hits 1991-2001 (Pudding House Invitational Series), Poems from a Teacher's Desk and Six Pack Poems To Go Postcard Collection (Harris Publications). Her individual poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Nimrod, Slipstream, Rattle, Many Mountains Moving, Pacific Review, Psychological Perspectives Journal of Jungian Thought, The Progressive Magazine and others with several Pushcart Prize nominations and work widely anthologized. She founded the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon in and is editor of their anthology: Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down (Scarlet Tanager Press). Zawinski has been PoetryMagazine.com's Features Editor since 2000.
