Late last year, Federal agents raided six Swift & Co. meat processing plants in six states in search of illegal immigrants working there. 1,282 people were arrested in Operation Wagon Train.
This month’s featured poet, Jacob Saenz, not only follows Pound’s advice to “make it new,” but converts this event into “news that stays news” in his poem, “Sweeping the States,” from our November issue:
they move in swift on the Swift
Plants in six states & sift
through the faces to separate
the dark from the light
like meat & seat them in
the back of vans packed tight
like the product they pack
& who’s to pick up the slack
the black & white can’t cut it
so the beef stacks sell single
to feed the pack the flock
who block passages & clog
the cogs of the machine the process
not so swift to give & grant a wish
of a place a stake in the land
handling the steaks for the rest
to take in to sate the mouths
of the stock who have stock
in the business of beef & beef
with the brown who ground them
It’s a strange irony that, as if proving that news really does stay news, one of the founding guarantors of this magazine in 1911 was none other than Charles H. Swift.
Kevin Young, also featured this month, invokes as well the harsh landscape in which so many work hard to earn a stake. Excerpted from a longer work, The Book of Hours, his lines may sound more lyrical, but they are equally tough, just as real. Here’s a sample:
Black like an eye
bruised night brightens
by morning, yellow
then grey —
a memory.
What the light was like.
All day the heat a heavy,
colored coat.
I want to lie
down like the lamb —
down & down
till gone —
shorn of its wool.
The cool
of setting & rising
in this valley,
the canyon between us
shoulders our echoes.
Moan, & make way.
Thanks for this post. I’d also like to point folks to the book SOME DECLARATIONS Y OTROS POEMS, by Javier O. Huerta. I’ll be doing a Shout Out on this book soon, but the connection between these two poets’ politics is relevant.
I’ll be looking forward to that Shout Out, Rigoberto. In Huerta’s book there’s a poem, “Toward a Portrait of the Undocumented,” with these lines, already much-quoted:
The economy is a puppeteer
manipulating my feet.
(Who’s in control when you dance?)
Pregnant with illegals, the Camaro
labors up the road; soon I will be born.
I am the heat
captured by infrared eyes.