Seeing into Luminous Places | Lucinda Ziesing
Every craftsperson and artist has tools of their trade. Poets use metaphors and images to engage readers imagination and make the story more memorable. Metaphors bypass rationality and take a more direct route to receptivity. However, some find poems strange creatures they’d rather avoid when they bump into one approaching them on the street corner. They look peculiar and they speak in a language not easily grokked. However, if you stop your hurry to listen and look at them a while, you’ll begin to see into a luminous place.
Writing a poem is hard to crack, too. It’s like eating from a bowl of unshelled pistachios. You have to slow everything down to focus on the one dark slit of open space between the two shells. Jam your thumb nail in between and slowly pull the shells apart. You sweat to get to a tiny green nut. The splitting open of the shell is considered a sign of good luck. So, too, with the making of a poem.
You can live many lives writing a poem—or reading one. You research people and places you never knew and suddenly have an intimate relationship with them. You have an experience and then you live it again and again by writing—or reading—about it. You notice details of an event. The place you’re in and the people you are in there with. You note how they make you feel. You may have missed all of this the first time around. But poems give you second, third, even more chances.
I’ve been going through letters my grandmother received from Frances Perkins during the 1930’s after she’d been appointed by FDR to be the first woman member of his Cabinet as Secretary of Labor. Frances Perkins’ mission to protect the dignity and rights of men and women workers was indelibly sealed when she witnessed the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire in 1911. It was the deadliest industrial disaster in New York City’s history until 9/11. 164 men and women, mostly immigrant teenage girls sewing Gibson girl blouses, were killed that late afternoon. The plea from the women’s garment union for safety regulations and decent work conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory had fallen on deaf ears the year before. Frances Perkins confessed that The New Deal was born in her that day.
Here’s a poem I wrote after visiting the site of the fire and the recently dedicated triangle fire memorial. The building still stands as it did, tucked just off Washington Square Park in New York City. This poem looks at the tragedy and how it gave rise to something that came to be called the “new deal”:
“A New Deal”
—William Dunn Shephard reporting for United Press
Smoke hovers
Blackens the top floors
Flames spit out
Women wedged
sewing shirtwaist blouses
the owner didn’t want them to steal.
So he zipped the building shut.
I learned a new sound that day.
It was the thud.
A speeding living body
a stone sidewalk.
Thud dead.
Thud dead.
Thud dead.
Sixty-two thud deads.
One girl uprighting herself
As she fell
her arms desperate for balance
until she hit the sidewalk.
Thud dead.
An unmoving heap of cloth,
cracked bones
one on top of another.
A living picture in each window.
Four girls their dresses on fire
screaming, “Call the firemen, Get a ladder”
The ladders too short.
The nets too weak.
The doors too locked.
Dozens of girls hanging from sills
until they let go.
Plenty of chance to watch
each fall 80 feet down.
Thud dead.
They jump
tearing the nets
like circus dogs leaping
through hoops.
Thud dead.
Thud dead.
Thud dead.
A young man in a fedora.
A redhead on the sill.
He holds her out straight
away from the building
and lets her drop.
Then another and another
as though he was helping them
into a streetcar to eternity.
Then love bursts in the flames.
He lifts a girl to the window
her braids on fire.
She wraps her arms around him
and kisses him.
He holds her out into space
and drops her too.
Then follows.
His coat fluttering
his trouser legs filling with air.
His tan shoes
his dark hose
his hat
still on his head.
Thud dead.
Thud dead.
18 minutes
146 workers
Mostly teenage girls
Scorched
Piled like fabric bolts
outside locked doors
into an elevator shaft
onto the sidewalk below.
A factory turned crematorium.
A New Deal was born that day.
What was “new” in that “deal”? You know that story—something life-giving borne from
the ashes of tragedy. That’s one poem, one “made” thing, which is what the Greek root
of the word—poiema—means. And if Maine is a state where beautiful things are made
by hand, this surely includes poems. At the upcoming Camden Festival of Poetry, May
17-18, 2024, you will carry home beautiful handmade things: poems. No shopping bag
required.
Lucinda Ziesing is a writer, actor, painter and producer. She received an MFA in writing from Spalding University. As a mixed media artist, her Public Works paintings are in private and corporate collections. She taught on the Theatre Faculty of Sarah Lawrence College and has appeared in productions in New York, Los Angeles and Maine. She produces events that celebrate community.
