by Phyllis Wax
Wednesday, Dec.15, 2010 (Reuters) A fire at a multi-story garment factory near the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, killed 25 people and injured more than 100 on Tuesday, police, firefighters and doctors said. More than 10,000 people, most of them women, work at the complex ....
Immigrants
locked in
to prevent pilfering
Low-paid seamstresses
waiting to be searched
at the finish of work
A careless match
and a pile of scraps
flares—
Smoke fills the workroom
Flames climb the stairs
of the twelve-story structure
On the top three floors
young women and girls
most Italian or Jewish
Fire truck ladders stretch
only to floor six From windows
on nine, a hundred feet up, they jump
to keep from being burned alive, bodies
thudding as they land
bodies piling up outside
Others burn to the bone
charred skeletons bent
over sewing machines
One hundred forty-six die
Phyllis Wax muses on the news and history from a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, WI. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Your Daily Poem, Wisconsin Poets' Calendar, Ars Medica, Out of Line, Verse Wisconsin, Seeding the Snow, A Prairie Journal, The New Verse Newsand many other journals and anthologies. She can be reached at poetwax(at)yahoo.com.
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