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The Life of a Digger

BY MARGARITA ENGLE

Henry from the island of Jamaica

Jamaican digging crews have to sleep
eighty men to a room, in huge warehouses
like the ones where big wooden crates
of dynamite are stored.

My hands feel like scorpion claws,
clamped on to a hard hard shovel all day,
then curled into fists at night.

At dawn, the steaming labor trains
deliver us by the thousands, down into
that snake pit where we dig
until my muscles feel
as weak as water
and my backbone
is like shattered glass.

But only half the day
is over.

At lunchtime, we see sunburned
American engineers and foremen
eating at tables, in shady tents
with the flaps left open,
so that we have to watch
how they sit on nice chairs,
looking restful.

We also watch the medium-dark
Spanish men, relaxing as they sit
on their train tracks, grinning
as if they know secrets.

We have no place to sit. Not even
a stool. So we stand, plates in hand,
uncomfortable
and undignified.

Back home, I used to dream of saving
enough Panama money
to buy a bit of good farmland
for Momma and my little brothers
and sisters, so that we would all
have plenty to eat.

Now all I want is a chair.
And food with some spice.
And fair treatment.
Justice.

Margarita Engle, "The Life of a Digger (Henry from the island of Jamaica)]" from Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal. Copyright © 2014 by Margarita Engle. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Source: Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)

Poem Source

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Commentary

What can I say, I found a new gem again. The good thing about it is that this is both beautiful and easy to understand. The topic is laid in-front of you and has a deep relevance into the life of a miner's life in Jamaica. This story resonates in all hard labor jobs. You start and work thinking you can do it and that once you save up money you can live a better life but when you get there your dreams gets crushed and an appreciation of the simple things reminds you of home and contentment.

The body of the poem is free flowing without constraints in the number of paragraph nor the lines in the paragraph. Don't let this fool a newbie poem fan. Although following a set of lines and paragraphs as well as last syllable symmetry is aesthetically pleasing and adds a bit of difficulty and challenge to it, sometimes if can be an obstacle to expressing how you want to feel and sometimes there's just no substitute for the words you are looking for. And on this poem I absolutely love the words used and believe it to be the most appropriate, and it would be a disservice to this poem had the other changed words to make it more symmetrical at the cost of the emotion that she wants to get across.

Its funny and quite unnerving how mankind as a whole has made marvels in technology, medicine, travel, entertainment. Quite almost every aspect of living has seen improvement exponentially just over the past hundred years and yet in the poorest regions and hardest of jobs it feels like those marvels of improvement are not seen nor applied. Only the mega rich can fly across the world sitting and served in their private jets, only the rich gets access to medicine that is almost magical in prolonging their life but the poorest of the poor has not seen a computer nor can fathom the existence of the internet nor do they have access to electricity, something some of us has lived with for a hundred years now since the time of Edison and Tesla.

If blockchain is to truly succeed it is not in making these HODLers rich beyond their imagination but the quality of life of those people who've yet to ever understand nor hear the word blockchain. Now how I got from the digging to blockchain was an uneasy and weird segway but there definitely is a connection. All in all this poem strikes true and real to me, as real as you and me.

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Disclaimer
I own no rights to the poem nor the picture and have stated my sources.

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Please support the arts, especially poetry as I fear it may be a dying breed in our culture.
-Sir. Picsalot