Poet who speaks for the workers
by Maxine
Today, January 10 is the birthday of poet, Philip Levine who was born in Detroit in 1928. After working in advertising and hating it, he got a job in the auto plants and realized that the workers didn't have a voice. So he decided to speak for them in his poetry. In one of his collections, Mercy, come these last lines from the poem, "Drum:"
The slow light of Friday morning in Michigan,
the one we waited for, shows seven hills
of scraped earth topped with crab grass,
weeds, a black oil drum empty, glistening
at the exact center of the modern world.
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