Now, here's a tribute to all the men and women
who have worked with our hands.
We banter back and forth the price for laying brick.
You people only pay the rich those who already have money.
I have a whole yard of bricks collected over 30 years working
as a damn mason, offer you a good price,
load them on the truck, bring sand and gravel,
do the work almost for nothing, and you
ain't going to pay me half what the hunter charges.
He was right.
I relented paid him $0.70 a block.
Next day he brought him, tow and cement mixer
behind his old truck.
He rounded the weeping Willow trunk with block
left over from apartment as he'd worked on six years ago.
Then poured cement and troweled it smooth.
After he was done, he asked, can I have that roller back wire?
He lives by scraps.
Built three houses for his daughters
was construction site scraps.
In English, his name is perfect flower.
Brawny man with bull shoulders, who 40 years ago
came from Tarahumara Mexico, tired of the mines
the somnolent spirit of Mexicans.
I was the first one to say I wouldn't ride the bus.
It was falling apart.
I refused and the rest followed.
And soon, a new boss was brought up the mountain.
I gave him our old Falcon for pouring cement
in the guest cottage.
And a jar of blessed black purple Akima corn kernels
for helping me uproot a tree.
Gave him seven rabbits and a box of chickens for help
me cut Adobe arches.
We curse and laugh as we work.
He proudly helps a wheelbarrow brimmed with cement, ha, 62,
cabrón, and you--
nah you'd break your damn back.
He ribs, proud of his strength.
He has nothing that glows his face so much as stories
of working years, feats of courage in the mines
when he was called upon to defuse dynamite that didn't
explode short, stocky, gray-haired man always
in his yard scattering chicken seed nailing sawing.
Always dressed in green overalls chews or ground weed
carries a stub pencil and a grimy water,
paper for figuring.
Always turns to me when I drive or walk
to his yard with a roguish grin.
His love of telling stories competes with mine.
He growls with laughter at the blisters on my hands,
spreads his palms up like a gallery owner who
strips black cloth off a prized van Gogh painting and says,
look, you could sharpen a fight on his hands, he grins proudly.
[APPLAUSE]