Working in America
We are skyscraper window washers, equine dentists, fighter-drone pilots. We are all sorts of sailors: merchant marines, submariners, ferry boat pilots, crabbers and Greenpeace sailors. We are policy makers, big-thought thinkers, writers and editors, cooks and chefs and servers, janitors and cleaners and street sweepers, laborers, carpenters and plumbers, vintners and mushroom cultivators, artists and welders and architects and high-steel workers. Fabricators of a million objects from space ships to Pez dispensers. Rocket scientists and gym teachers. Baseball players and bridge builders.
Just a list of the names reads like a poem by Walt Whitman, who did indeed celebrate working America in poetry:
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deck-hand singing on the steamboat deck …
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else …