STILL TOMORROW'S GONNA BE ANOTHER WORKING DAY...

I was the indentured servant,

Whose fare was paid

in return,

for a youth of labor

Under harsh masters

But young, and strong

And full of illusions for a New Life

In a New World

I came in steerage...hopeful

Never to return to England, or 

The Deutschland

Or Norway, Sweden, 

Scandinavia...

Over There to

An infancy of coal mines

Of chimney sweeping, 

And textile mills

I milked their cows, worked in their fields,
And my sisters scrubbed their floors
And cleaned their house

My  callused hands

Felled the oceans of forest pine

With sharpened steel

In the New Land

And cleared the prairie

Of Tall Grass with a polished

Killing plow

We lived in mounds of sod, 

beset by heat, 

And blizzards...

That lasted weeks

To see the locusts devour our crops

And stubborn, to start again

We dug canals for the boats
tunnels for the city trains

and pushed, and pushed... 

We pushed out the Native

from his cleared forest,

West...

Those after me brought the Old World

With them

The Tartar, Jew, the Ites,

Even the shunned Sons of Eire

Came

And were told that they

"Need Not Apply," by those of us

Who came before
To this,
The best poor-man's country...

They joined the blacks in cities

Who had been brought in slavers,

Interned in southern camps

Their masters called plantations

To a life of forced labor, slaves

A few who could escape, came up

A non-existent railroad 

And after a proper, uncivil, slaughter

Between the white North and southern brothers,

In droves 

To the industrial north

Out west, the chinks, Chinese and Japs

Slant-eyes to all

Ground out the mounts of granite

for the Iron Horse, and

Scrubbed mounds of laundry

Of the Good People

And in the war, as fodder,

Found Lost Patrols

And, doing that, lost more of theirs 

than they saved

Of them

While their kinfolk lived

Behind barbed wire

In government camps

And the Mexes bent and stooped

To make the western deserts green

To make the USA 

the best fed nation

North or South

While they wandered from camp to camp

And led their lives,

Feeding themselves

From hand to mouth

But during the wars

they couldn't get enough of them

To work the fields
And by train loads brought them here

Until the soldier boys came back

Then, like the Chinese, 

Were then deported, ahem, excluded

We formed clubs, associations

Unions, then

In slaughterhouses, foundries,

Production lines,

And migrant camps

And battled Frick, and Henry Ford,

And Gallo wine

But Frick and they, and heirs

Bought out the House

The Senate, too

And told us that back East

They said

"They were paying too much,

They said that your ore ain't worth diggin'

That's its much cheaper down South American towns

Where the workers work

Almost for nothin'..."

Now, instead of importing slaves,

They send their capital there

And the workforce here,

Is asked to

"Diversify,"
To learn new skills
To "develop"

Learn gigabites, the newest app
And cyberspeak

To compete for hunger wages

With Latins, Chinese and the masses of

The Subcontinent

The fertile farmer, the laborer,

The men and women

In production lines

Can only hope their kids

Grow up and leave

Somewhere...but where?

There is no New World

Over There

There's only the Here and Now

Still "tomorrow is gonna be 

Another working day

And I'm trying to get some rest..."

That's all we're trying

To get some rest