Alabanza

Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100

for the 43 members of Hotel Employees
and Restaurant Employees Local 100,
working at the Windows on the World
restaurant, who lost their lives in
the attack on the World Trade Center

Alabanza. Praise the cook with a
shaven head and a tattoo on his shoulder
that said Oye, a blue-eyed Puerto Rican
with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo,
candle glimmering white to worship the
dark saint of the sea.

Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow
Pirates cap worn in the name of
Roberto Clemente, his plane that flamed
into the ocean loaded with cans for
Nicaragua, for all the mouths chewing
the ash of earthquakes.

Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio,
dial clicked even before the dial
on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread.

Alabanza.
Praise Manhattan from a hundred and
seven flights up, like Atlantis
glimpsed through the windows of an
ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where
immigrants from the kitchen could
squint and almost see their world,
hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, Republica
Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana,
Bangladesh.

Alabanza. Praise the kitchen
in the morning, where the gas burned
blue on every stove and exhaust fans
fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an
altar of cans.

Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music,
the chime-chime of his dishes and
silverware in the tub.

Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog,
the dishwasher who worked that morning
because another dishwasher could not
stop coughing, or because he needed
overtime to pile the sacks of rice
and beans for a family floating away
on some Caribbean island plagued
by frogs.

Alabanza. Praise the waitress who
heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone.

Alabanza.
After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass
of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing
like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and
flooded the kitchen, for a time the
stoves glowed in darkness like the
lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook's soul. Soul I say,
even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God's beard
because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings
flung in constellations across the
night sky of this city and cities
to come.

Alabanza I say,
even if God has no face.

Alabanza. When the war began,
from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose
and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said
with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance.
We have no music here.
And the other said
with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you.
Music is all we have.

-- Martín Espada

Posted over on Poets Against the War