Catalina Rodriguez, 24,
body shrivelled to a child's at twelve,
catalina rodriguez, last stages of consumption,
works for three dollars a week from dawn to midnight.
A fog of pain thickens over her skull, the parching heat
breaks over her body.
and the bright red blood embroiders the floor of her room.
White rain stitching the night, the bourgeois poet would say,
white gulls of hands, darting, veering,
white lightning, threading the clouds,
this is the exquisite dance of her hands over the cloth,
and her cough, gay, quick, staccato,
like skeleton's bones clattering,
is appropriate accompaniment for the esthetic dance
of her fingers
and the tremulo, tremulo when the hands tremble with pain.
Three dollars a week,
two fifty-five,
seventy cents a week,
no wonder two thousands eight hundred ladies of joy
are spending the winter with the sun after he goes down . . .
— Tillie Olsen, excerpt,
"I Want You Women Up North To Know"
--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Left writers today who valorize the poor: Bell
> Hooks, Alice Waker,
> Tillie Olsen....just off the top of my head. Lots of
> people publishing
> to ZNet too.
>
> Joanna
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
"Mary Poppins is alive and well in Argentina, she sends her regards." - Rod McKuen, The Mud Kids
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