Bank Strike1942Quebec

space hung about like washing.

Through the snow

faces went by like flags before a fear. .

Standing as twins in bas-relief I knew

sudden as camera's click

the printless news:

our failure even was not ours alone.

BANK STRIKE - 1942 - QUEBEC

When the time came,

after the historied waiting,

they were ready with their strikers' jackets

and their painted signs en greve,

facing the known streets

and the rough serge knees and elbows

of police.

Time was bald on their skins,

their desks and counters and cages

cried in their eyes like a strategical retreat

and the unrelieved picket line

had a stained, for-all-time permanence

on the distorted street.

In the foreground church

the flames of the sacred candles

burned, in their suddenly foreign homes

their meals were stiff as religious paintings

and the bullet of "fired"

was wedged in their skulls.

Yet from the cellar of certainty they came

up the long escalator to defeat,

their hearts hurting their ribs, their hands heavy;

blew hot and cold

and scratched the solid curb

like weather worrying an iron city.