So, I wanted to honor the laborers who
are not honored at the time.
At the time people only thought about the engineering
of the Panama Canal, and how amazing the engineering
was that you could connect two oceans.
It didn't cross their minds that there
were men with shovels, digging, not just a few steam shovels,
not just a few examples of powerful machinery,
but tens of thousands of men at a time,
actually cutting through the Continental Divide,
transforming mountains into a canal,
and the biggest artificial lake in the world, which
fills the locks, that lifts the ships so that the ocean
level can be matched between the two oceans.
If you've been through that canal,
it's a job so phenomenal.
It's hard to imagine it being done with equipment impossible,
to imagine it being done by men with shovels.
But I'd like to read just a few poems.
This is in the voice of Matteo, a young Cuban boy who
pretended to be a Spaniard so that he could get a job.
Most of the Islanders were recruited
on the English speaking islands.
By far, the vast majority were Barbadians and Jamaicans.
But this is a Cuban boy which I chose to use
his voice as one of the--
ones to tell the story.
I chose it out of cultural familiarity,
and because there were Cubans included.
The poem is titled "Howlers."
Ferocious jungle heat closes in around us
like the blaze of a glowing oven,
the train steams through deep forest shade
beneath spidery brilliant red flowers
that dangle from sky high branches like flames.
Some of the rain shiny leaves are shaped like green hands,
others like hearts, livers, or kidneys,
making the whole forest seem like one
enormous magical creature, with an endless body
and a fiery mind.