Today's poem is by Deborah Gorlin

Dark Materials
       

In the morgue of dark materials and outsourced merchandise,
this time in Bangladesh, the thousand or so seamstresses

among the four million who toil at their treadles,
have burned to death, bent fixed over their sewing machines,

perhaps eternally to thread a needle, rewind a bobbin,
correct a stitch like bird tracks. A holocaust of dress

without fire escapes. At Jewish funerals, after the rabbi
makes the first cut, vertical near the neck, left side

by the heart, mourners rent their own garments
by hand, about three inches down to symbolize

their sorrow in a ceremony of civility, a wise constraint
to stem the violence of grief, for those mourners who

otherwise might mutilate themselves or destroy
property, who understandably in this prior instance,

Jew or anyone, curse the corporate Pharaohs with plagues,
swarm the stores like locusts, The Gap, Tommy Hilfiger,

Walmart, Old Navy. An imprecatory call to God to loose
beasts down their aisles, wrench from flung hangers, the flimflam

dresses, slash to rags, bite buttons off, sacrifice jackets
in a slaughter of apparel. Like Jacob after he saw Joseph's

bloody coat, this enraged mob might shred their own clothes
down to the seams, unweave woof and warp; after that, start

in on the loom of their own bones, strip skin off, pull out hair,
— and when after that the tormenting containment of the body,

terse vent of the mouth, slits of the eyes, are too tiny openings
to keen their full anguish, then they will take matters

into their own hands, to tear their hearts out.

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Copyright © 2024 Deborah Gorlin All rights reserved
from Open Fire
Bauhan Publishing
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission