Hello again friends. I hope your day is beautiful today. It is day 20 of National Poetry Month! We are more than halfway through, but with an undeniable opportunity and plenty of creative flow presenting itself, I am quite sure I will be extending my poem-a-day challenge for myself well into May.

Today’s prompt organized by our caring and big-hearted host Nancy Lyneé Woo was to write a tribute to a person or group you admire: What do they do? Why are they important? What have you learned?

Immediately, I thought – what would we do without all the working regular folks? Those so often unappreciated, ignored, passed in the street like they were specters, but then blamed for everything (and I mean it seems like every thing) that goes wrong – from the server who didn’t make the food but still gets the whole dinner plate slammed at her face because the meat is undercooked, to the wage earners “rocking the boat” by asking for pay increases at a time when inflation has made it nearly impossible for them to feed their families.

I’m including my freewrite, and the poem from today beneath it. I’m pretty sure I will turn this into a project. I hope it encourages contemplation from those who read it. But most of all, I hope it helps you pay more attention to the hundreds, thousands or depending on how big a place you live in, even millions without whom you could not even survive.

Please. Thank a “blue collar worker” today. But more than that, give them the dignity and respect they earn with blood and sweat every single day.

Freewrite:

Praise for my friends that have become family working to keep nursing home residents safe and healthy. Praise for my sister who rises early on our travel adventures so we can take apart the hotel beds and leave a note of encouragement and blessing for the housekeeper, who in some other hotel halfway around the world is her mother. Praise for Mary Chapin Carpenter who suggested in her 1992 hit that if we strike it rich, we buy the waitress a new car. Praise for sanitation workers and a grandmother who taught me early to be grateful, appreciate, not abuse the services of others – that they are not there for use and abuse, as some believe. That they are deserving of a wave, a smile, a thank you; acknowledgement of our brotherhood and the fact that somewhere out there in the multiverse, a past life or a future, they are us.

Song for a Nursing Home

Song for the people who rise at 4 AM,
leave sleeping children,
drive down a mountain to this place
twinkling in the dead of night , prepare
breakfast for those who can no longer fix it for themselves and pray
no silent interloping spores enter their lungs
during the escapades of this day, walk
silent halls, past the empty
office of the director to pass snacks;
for housekeepers who give a kind smile and a warm blanket
while cleaning up incontinence,
CNAs who don’t walk past call of help lights because
“it’s break time” and
“their family never comes anyway;”
for nurses who never yell
“I have rights too!”
at their patients.