ManicDDaily

Years ago, I was lucky enough to do field work in India studying Indian trade unions.   (More about that some other time.)   This is a poem about a wonderful trade union leader, who very kindly took me under his wing, allowing me to travel with him to various union headquarters around the state of Gujerat.

Have I learned anything?

Ah this is better.
This is sitting down.
This is getting some tea.
This is biting into an orange peel, just slightly, before peeling.
This is biting into the orange.
I think about the labor leader I knew in Ahmadabad.
How they would bring him his coffee
in the morning, me my tea.
He had given up tea, he said,
when Gandhi said to, and ever since,
taking a hot slurp,
he had never drunk it.
Because of the British.

In the same way, in the car,
he took out all his toiletries, one by one, handing
them to me for examination:
a small soap still wrapped in its green labeled paper,
collected from an Indian hotel,
his razor, his comb—he combed
his close cropped hair before handing it to me as if
to show its use—a small towel–
he really didn’t have very much–a small
scissors.  His feet were up
on the seat.  Now
he brought one to his knee, shifting
his white cloth dhoti, and
clipped the toe nails quickly, first
one foot then the other.
He collected as he clipped
the small white crusts of nail, then
opened the window a bit wider
to toss them out.

“You see how I am always busy,” he said.  “Never
a moment idle, wasted.  I am busy all the time,
you see how I am doing it.”
He took the toiletries back from me.

I finish my breakfast slowly,
just sitting.

(For a different side of Labor Day weekend, i.e. the very sad end of vacation side, check out the Last Voyage of the Summer, below.   And, as always, check out 1 Mississippi (Karin Gustafson) at link above.)