Longshore by Ernie Brill

Longshore 
(from the collection “Industrial Claims”)


Art’s work for thirty seven years involved

Working the docks of the Bay Area.

“My ships come in from all over the world.

You name the country; I unloaded it.”

Often, some holds had dust so white and thick

Art couldn’t see his co-workers five feet away.

“We didn’t get the gear guys get today-

The masks, the respirators, and the breaks

Didn’t happen until the late forties

After the Big Strike and the Union came.”

“Where’d I work? What did I do? Let me see.”

Pier Thirteen: cheap clothes from South Korea.

Pier Eight: Brazilian cowhides. Boy, they stank!

Pier Twenty was Australian wool. It itched!

Pier Thirty Nine: copper from the Congo.

And let’s not forget my favorite: Pier 3

That was everybody’s favorite turn

Jameson whiskey crates from Ireland”

“I’ll tell you what you can do for me, son,”

He wheezes, sucking his respirator,

“Far’s  money goes, I’ll get by. Better if you

Figure a way to get me some new lungs.

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Ernie Brill writes about omitted every day wonders of the big cities. He keeps four eyes and two ears open as much as he can. He made it through a BA and Ma (on Chester Himes which he had to fight for since the one teacher in the Dept who even know who Himes was felt Himes was a secondrate writer even though he read only one of his sixteen novels and none of his groundbreaking Harlem Crime series featuring two detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedgigger Jones; the same department refused to let Brill do his MA  on the poet Sterling A. Brown because he had only published one book of poetry all the way back in 1932 even though Brilll pointed out that he had also led the creation of a 1200 page anthology The Negro Caravan in his role as Director of The Negro Section of The Federal Writers Project in 1941. So do you wonder why Brill joined the historic student strike against racism at San Francsico State from November 6 1968 til May 21 when after 700 arrests and many hospitalizatons and a police from seven Bay Area cities occupied campus for five and a half months that ultimately won the country's first Black Studies Dept. and an entire School of Ethnic Studies that last year celebrated its 50th anniversary with all week panels and evening poetry readings of over 500 students and faculty  and community members. It was this strike when he was 23 that profoundly helped make Brill the writer, teacher, and pioneering curricullum developer he became creating literature units for high school and college in African American, Latin American, and middleeastern literature units, plus creative writing classes using an expanded American literature selection including works by Native American, Italian American, and Arab American authors. Brill has also widely pubished fiction,poetry, and essays in literary and alternative magazines, anthologies, union newspapers, and regularly reads at open mics in his areas and others on Zoom when possible and plausible. His favorite writes include Damon Runyon, Virginia Woolf,Richard Wright, Tom Kromer, Thomas McGrath, Pablo Neruda, Judy Grahn, Pedrp Pietri, Sterlimg A. Brown, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, Chester Himes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Hyesoon Kim,Susan Powers, Richard Wright, Toni cade Bambaa, Leo Tolstoi, Victor Serge, Daniel Borzutzky, Douglas Kearney, Patricia Smith, Tyehimba Jess,, Toshi Mori.