She'd walked to work at sundown
When the blue dissolved to evening
Past the roadside vendors cooking fires,
Not yet bright enough for deepening
The outline of the factory-house
Where night-time shifts were gathering
'Round the early evening cooking scents,
Boiled rice, and bread and lentils
Carried on the twilight breezes with
A light refrain that mentioned
The hunger in her mid-riff
And the mild persistent headache
At the urgent anxious anger that
Her fears and hopes resembled.
And the nagging hopeless worry
That the money wouldn't stretch.
Treading lightly, sandals slapping
In a rhythm never blindly
To be misconstrued as anything
But a walk to work, and quietly.
One hand clutching at her sari,
Coughing mutely through her head-shawl
Barely breathing through the mocking
Of the jeering tuk-tuk drivers
Past the dust cloud covered concrete
With the reek of sun-soaked diesel
And the mouthing finger-thrusting
And humiliating cat-calls
That permeate her modesty
And her sense of self-retrieval
With a fierce determination
That the future must be faced
She'd felt the first forced tremble
In the walls and floors beneath her
And the slowly sliding shifting
Of her sewing, soiled machine
As it cannoned past the T-shirts
Through the carefully folded blouses
And toppled from the table top
To smash against the floorboards
When the building crumpled inwards
And the chaos and the screaming
Chased the panic to the exits
Down the staircase to the ground.
Then the ceiling at the center of the
Wide, high whitened work room
Caved in with crash and cursing
As the lighting dimmed and died
Now, far above she hears the cadence
Through the gauze of dimming clarity
Fire truck sirens moan hysteria
Within the tinnitus of silence
Tumbled past the dust caked boulders
Of the colorless construction
Prostrated down below
In the humid darkened stillness.
Trapped and jammed into the spaces
Where the falling floors had forced her.
Where the grinding groaning echoes
Of the debris and the torture
Close her throat to swells of panic
For her mother and her daughter
In the two-roomed cardboard shanty
Miles above and hours away
Barely conscious, breathing lightly
Through the dust and reek of faeces
Thinking of her crowded back-room
Where she'd bathed her infant daughter
In the tin-roofed cardboard shanty
By the stinking standing water
And where her husband’s insobriety
Nightly terminates in snoring
After shouting and the swearing
And occasional forbearance
When her mother’s stifled terror
Terminates in tempers risings
And the all pervading violence
That resolves in resignation
And completes the shaming sequence
By the act of copulation
In the wreckage work continues
Where the rescue teams are scrabbling
In the arms of their dilemma
To keep searching or accepting
That the paradox of seeing and then again
Believing in the hopeless expectations
That some persons can be found
Far below and hours away
The burning thirst has found her
Past the pain of her right shoulder
And the numbness in her legs.
The acrid smoke that holds her
Transfixed in shallow coughing
While the sari starts to smolder
To the agony of breathing
As she hoarsely tries to scream
In a conference room in London
In the tautly tensioned Aerons
Women smooth their sculpted short skirts
As the slicked-down young supplier
Holds a T-shirt for inspection
To the murmured confirmation
Of the busy buoyant buyers
That the pricing must be right.
Miles above and hours away
Six degree's of separation
Form a loosely joined connection
Out of mind and out of sight.
One by one the vendor cooking fires
Turn to embers and to ashes
While miles below and far away
Comes the dying of the light.