Free She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems by Caroline Kennedy Page A

off
    (racked days, searching for work; rebuffs; suspicious eyes of
    policemen.)
    goodbye ambrosa, mebbe in dallas I find work; desperate swing
    for a freight,
    surprised hands, clutching air, and the wheel goes over a
    leg,
    the railroad cuts it off, as it cut off twenty-five years of his life.)
    She says that he prays and dreams of another world, as he lies
    there, a heaven (which he does not know was brought to earth
    in 1917 in Russia, by workers like him).
    Women up north, I want you to know
    when you finger the exquisite handmade dresses
    what it means, this working from dawn to midnight,
    on what strange feet the feverish dawn must come
    to maria, catalina, ambrosa,
    how the malignant fingers twitching over the pallid faces jerk them
    to work,
    and the sun and the fever mounts with the day—
    long plodding hours, the eyes burn like coals, heat jellies the
    flying fingers,
    down comes the night like blindness.
    long hours more with the dim eye of the lamp, the breaking
    back,
    weariness crawls in the flesh like worms, gigantic like earth’s in
    winter.
    And for Catalina Rodriguez comes the night sweat and the blood
    embroidering the darkness.
    for Catalina Torres the pinched faces of four huddled
    children,
    the naked bodies of four bony children,
    the chant of their chorale of hunger.
    And for twenty eight hundred ladies of joy the grotesque act gone
    over—
    the wink—the grimace—the “feeling like it baby?”
    And for Maria Vasquez, spinster, emptiness, emptiness,
    flaming with dresses for children she can never fondle.
    And for Ambrosa Espinoza—the skeleton body of her brother on
    his mattress
    of rags, boring twin holes in the dark with his eyes to the image of
    christ
    remembering a leg, and twenty-five years cut off from his life by
    the railroad.
    Women up north, I want you to know,
    I tell you this can’t last forever.
    I swear it won’t.

PS Education
    ELLEN HAGAN
    Take all the metal detectors apart and build imaginary cities with them. Then my 7th graders can build a utopia and walk around in it. Tell Harold, the security guard, who sings only Tito Puente songs, that he can have his own music room, and buy gold trumpets and trombones that slide like hot oil. Buy drums that rumble the whole school: da-dum, da-dum. Build a garden as big as the football field at Taft High School and feed everything. Tell Myles he can have a quiet room to fall asleep in, because I know he is tired. I know you are tired, Myles, but you cannot keep calling Russell a fat fuck, “Yo Russell, you fat fuck,” over and over until Russell has to stand up and punch Myles where he deserves it most. And why not? Call Russell a genius, who sure knows how to write about his grandma and the shiny wheelchair she rolls in. Tell Shelquan to get down from the air conditioner. He is singing, “This is why I’m hot,” with sunglasses he stole from Crystal, whose best friend Kiara has carved the word HATE in her arm. Remind Crystal and her girl Kiara that a woman should never mark her body with a word meant to destroy. Yell at them loudly and when Crystal’s nana shows up at the school, tell her anyway, even though she does not speak English and Crystal might not translate. She might. Tell Yaneira that she is a hot skillet when she writes, and not a “retard,” which is what Eduardo calls her under his breath. A fire woman. Really. And when Fatumata stops you in the street in front of the McDonald’s to say good morning, tell her she is late again, but yes, good morning. And tell her to get out of 339, or ask her to help you make it better. You know she can. Listen to Racheal’s poem over and over again. She needs it when Angel, who you cannot believe has turned on you, makes fun of the lilt in her voice, stare him down with your witchy eyes. Tell him, teach him how to say, “I will look at you Racheal and I will see you,” 1,000 times over. Racheal, where Trinidad