Irene Willis
It may seem strange to offer up a sad song on a day that should be all celebration. This yearly national holiday, the first Monday in September, was created to honor the achievements of American workers, and yet they and their rights are under attack now as seldom before in our memory. That is, if they are lucky enough to have jobs. If they are unemployed, they may even be targets of a new kind of discrimination. Many job listings currently advertise: “No unemployed will be considered.”
The poem below is one of my own, a dramatic monologue originally published in For a Living: The Poetry of Work, an anthology edited by Nicholas Coles and Peter Oresick (University of Illinois Press, 1995), and also included in my first collection, They Tell Me You Danced (University Press of Florida, 1995). It’s autobiographical only in the sense that I once worked in an office like this and overheard such conversations. The speaker in “Easy Hours” is a state worker, unionized, as are all the people around her.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Easy Hours
From my mother’s sleep.
— I fell into the State
–Randall Jarrell
I didn’t fall into this job
the way some did.
Actually, I just walked in
off the street, I guess you could say –
up some granite steps and through
a glass door taped against the wind.
The first thing I noticed was the way
that door was taped, some of the windows too.
And a guy walking up on the flat roof
in the rain, fooling around with some wire.
Later I’d watch him from the twelfth floor
window while I waited for somebody to come up
and crack it open, give me a little air.
I’ve got allergies. Doctor says to watch it
or it might turn into asthma.
But those fumes from the copying machine
and the cigarette smoke from the hall
near the elevator bother me something awful.
I get all congested.
Still, it’s better than what my parents had.
Great benefits.
My dad worked an assembly line.
My mom too – a defense plant during the war.
Later she became a union organizer – my little mom.
Hard to believe, you know what I mean?
When the war was over she went to selling clothes
in a big department store. That’s why her feet
are so bad today, they wouldn’t let her sit down.
No chairs on the sales floor.
Lila in that corner office over there, her mom
cleaned houses, she never got over it.
I don’t know who took it worse, Lila or her mom,
because Lila never stops talking about it.
I mean it’s like a punctuation mark: cleaning
Miss Anna’s kitchen. “It’s better than cleaning
Miss Anna’s kitchen,” is what she always says.
I clean my own kitchen after work.
Don’t get me wrong. This job with the State is
good. Easy hours. You get to sit down all day,
take a vacation once in a while. Hey, look,
in three years I’ll be vested.