The poet
Philip Levine died on February 14. I suspect that many of the readers of this
blog are familiar with Levine’s poetry, but for those who aren’t, let me write
just a few words of introduction.
Levine was
the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and was born in Detroit in 1928,
the height of the Great Depression. As a young man he worked a number of
blue-collar jobs, lifting and stacking, running a punch press, operating a
jackhammer. Much of Levine’s poetry is about work, the people who do it, and
the lives they lead. He writes in a straightforward narrative style, unadorned
and unaffected, but carefully crated and emotionally powerful.
I see my
uncles in his poems. And today’s factory workers and miners and hospital aides…and
the guys lining up in the mornings outside lumber yards and big box home
improvement stores looking for a day’s work.
I reprint
below one of Levine’s best-known poems “What Work Is.” In honor of Levine, NPR
replayed him reading the poem. Click here
to hear it.
“What Work Is”
We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.
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