Well, while I was in law school--
I went to Northeastern law school in Boston.
And I went out on something called
co-op, which is their work program,
in the second and third year.
I was sent to the migrant legal action
program of Washington DC.
And they, in turn, sent me out into the fields
to do outreach among farm workers in rural Maryland,
particularly in Maryland's Eastern shore--
the Salisbury area.
And it was there that I began to her hear all kinds of stories.
And this next poem is loosely based on one of those tales.
It's called "Federico's Ghost."
"The story is that whole families of fruit pickers
still crept between the furrows of the field at dusk
when, for reasons of whisky or whatever,
the crop duster plane sprayed anyway, floating a pesticide
drizzle over the pickers who thrashed like dark birds
in a glistening white net.
Except for Federico, a skinny boy who stood apart
in his own green row.
And knowing the pilot would not understand in Spanish
that he was a son of a whore, instead jerked his arm
and thrust an obscene finger.
The pilot understood.
He circled the plane and sprayed again,
watching a fine gauze of poison drift
over the brown bodies that cowered and scurried
on the ground, and aiming for Federico, leaving the skin
beneath his shirt wet and blistered,
but still pumping his finger at the sky.
After Federico died, rumors at the labor camp
told of tomatoes picked and smashed
at night, growers muttering of vandal children or communists
in camp.
First threatening to call immigration,
then promising every Sunday off, if only the smashing
of tomatoes would stop.
Still, tomatoes were picked and squashed in the dark.
And the old women in camp said it was Federico,
laboring after sundown to cool the burns on his arms,
flinging tomatoes at that crop duster that
hummed like a mosquito lost in his ear
and kept his soul awake."