-Toilers of the Sagamore-

I recall certain aspects of my past
with more clarity than other recollections

which today I know to be true, or at least,
elements cling to a modicum of "truth enough"

to justify truth in the telling.

here, I'll recall the inner hatband stitcher

although I don’t remember my mother

as ever sewing anything inside the house,
not even the hem of a garment,

or of there being a sewing machine

inside the house in the way there was
an ironing board or the television or sugar,
and although I never actually saw
my mother at her work station, stitching by machine,
the leather inner hatbands exclusively for the heads of men,

I know for a period in time, that’s what she did.

occasionally, I’d ride along with my uncle Frank to pick-her-up,

(my father, on the road somewhere beyond Buzzards Bay)

along with her sisters, Frank's wife among them
as the first shift came to an end at four o'clock;
the young,— mostly young women,

the Italian, the Portuguese, the French and Irish

poured from the great textile mill
through its large set of wooden double doors,
high above street level as if the sweltering factory displaced
its own weight in the late afternoon atmospherics, the doors
held open by non-union men in white shirts and neckties,
and from the double-wide space, the women descending the rough-
sawed granite steps as in a glistening stream flowing over stones

to the waiting cars of their men, the engines running,

always the engines running, and their men waiting there
and Uncle Frank and me waiting there with them.

(as this writing was progressing, I was assuming the end result

would find the women descending, weary, sullen-faced, silent..

but here are the lady garment workers of the Sagamore,

the card-carrying members of the I.L.G.W.U., the drenched,
color-beaded flow of them, stepping downward,

talking among themselves, planning their suppers, planning
a possible Saturday afternoon at the "Narrows", the green
and wooded Watuppa Reservation's picnic grounds,–– descending,

laughing, touching one another as if nothing of the inside had happened.

                                leaving the "sweatshops" / Quequechan, 1952 / 1955