The fact that Philip Levine is our new Poet Laureate tends to reassure me that not all is broken in America. Through (despite?) his experiences as a working-class, physical laborer in Detroit, he wrote.
In reference to his many poems about the grit and grief of factory work, Levine has said: “I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.”
It is in this spirit that I share with you a beautiful poem by Jo Taylor.
WORKDAY DREAMS
by Jo Taylor
The bell shrieks, announces
the end of her shift. Carmen
steps out of the stiff gray uniform
into her skirt, a fiesta
of swirl and primary colors.
She abandons the belching machine
for the clatter of flamenco heels
on an oak floor. After a night
of dancing, salsa glances,
and the twitch of her skirt,
Carmen is doomed to the starch
of the next day’s shift,
her only conversation
with belts and oily gears,
dialogue in an intricate plot.
Each morning the factory clock
blurts cha-chunk—swallows
her time like greasy food
for hungry cogs and wheels.
She dons the gray trousers
of the uniform, slogs within the steel
music of the workday, dreams
the twirl of her harlequin skirt,
guitar and castanets, tapping,
clapping, Olé! Olé!