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| The New Yorker cover by Malika Favre |
We celebrate Hartz Mountain worker-women
in the pet food factory in Hackensack,
treated worse than the dogs they fed,
their every move, bathroom break
surveilled by bosses when they
dared to organize a union.
We give thanks for Irene Eaglin,
who came north on rails of Jim Crow,
scrubbed white women’s floors with calloused hands,
wore a pink uniform that marked her as a servant,
taught the pale child in her charge
about the Klan and apartheid.
We remember the children of Soweto,
commemorated by museum garden stones,
who marched by the hundreds in blizzards of bullets,
armed with chants and posters claiming
the right to learn in their own tongue
and to grow up.
In solidarity, we honor Victor Jara,
in the Santiago stadium, where he sang
against the dictator to horror-stricken fans
who looked on as torturers mangled his body,
and he played liberation songs on his guitar
with broken hands.
We bow our heads today
for 18 year-old Neveah Crain,
hours after her Texas baby shower,
when sepsis set in, lingered, and doctors
refusing to remove the “unviable fetus”
from her womb, let them both die.
We write epic poems to Kamala, a woman of color
who ran to run our fragile, fractured nation
where men afraid to let a woman lead
chose instead to listen to propaganda
to hide the timorous family member
trembling between their own legs.
We welcome them all to stand with us now
in a parched land we scarcely recognize,
scarred by the lust for profit and power,
oil and blood, that has left us searching
for our voices and each other,
thirsting for the rain.