1996

Julia Stein

This is the year women started walking again.
In Los Angeles we are walking outside the big whale
of a shopping center carrying picket signs to get garment workers
a union in our city which had Thai slaves sewing clothes.

We are the daughters of Fannie Sellins who was
gunned down in a mill yard, whose hat was stolen from
her dead body by a deputy who laughed at her corpse,
whose death set off the great steel strike of 1919.

We are the daughters of Sara Plotkin who walked all over
in 1932 organizing in the coal fields from Pittsburgh
to Wheeling, snuck in and out of company towns, evaded spies
with potato sacks, and who lived to tell her tale.

They whispered us their secrets , handed them down,
mother to daughters. We have their courage as our inheritance.
Just as our mothers walked across the coal fields,
we have begun to walk across this land.

Julia Stein is a part-time English instructor at Santa Monica College. She has recently published two books of poetry.