I'll finish my reading with this poem.
This is also a poem about immigrants and immigration.
It's a 9/11 poem, but it's a 9/11 poem with a twist,
because the focus is on the food service workers who
were killed that day, most of them
immigrant, and most of them undocumented--
invisible in life; even more invisible in death.
And that's why I wrote the poem--
to make the invisible visible, to humanize the dehumanized.
Of course, the word "alabanza" means "praise" in Spanish.
And the title also refers to the labor union
to which these workers belong.
I wrote this poem a year after 9/11,
and the meaning of the poem keeps on changing.
And it changes again here in the age of Trump.
We have something to say about that.
So I'll finish with this poem.
"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 107 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, Mexico, 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.
Muchas gracias.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.