Poem

The White Cranes in Oakland Harbor

Adele Kearney  ·  2009

The sparkling white cranes on the waterfront
are a new species born this century.
China has a huge flock; its size ranks number one.
The Port of Oakland’s flock ranks forty-three.

Living cranes are hardly more graceful than
these, like slim dancers at a cotillion,
facing yellow partners in the harbor;
each metal crane may have cost a million.

In bloody battles of 1934,
on Bloody Thursday, the fifth of July,
police shoot Howard Sperry, Nicholas Bordois,
seaman and sympathizer, and they die.

The next day there was the funeral march;
the absence of the police was complete.
The parade was a mile and a half long.
Strikers and mourners marched down Market Street.

Then the San Francisco Labor Council
called the city’s four-day general strike.
Theatres, night clubs, non-union trucks joined.
The nation watched — we’d rarely seen the like.

Eighty-three long troubled days that summer
get them close to the buck an hour they want —
ninety-five cents — in the great depression —
unions for every West Coast waterfront.

Now, the crane driver sits in the cabin
with computer info and motor power,
pushes buttons, moves fingers, twists a wrist,
makes a lot more than a dollar an hour.

More pay — but small unions, weaker by far.
Work better paid, easier, less boring.
Is this what we wanted instead of our
old chancy, back-breaking stevedoring?

Ask the magic crane in Tibet that knows
the hardest things. It knows some work is more
for foolish, hurtful aims or even crime,
for drugs, for money, for weapons, for war.

Its answer is more questions. Don’t we want
to let all workers speak, to have their say
on who works, what work they do, for how long,
and for how much pay should be their workday?

Now that work is transformed by powered cranes,
communication, and automation,
isn’t it time to think: less work, new work,
new workers, a new world, a new nation?

© Adele Kearney 2009