Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Maria Theresa Maggi
52 years old
I am a poet and astrologer who lives in Moscow, Idaho. My poems have appeared in various literary magazines and Journals, and I have one book published, The Rings Around Saturn, by The Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada.
An Iraqi Garbage Collector
(a poem “found” from within a War News Radio transcript, Nov 30, 2007)
We start work before sunrise. We continue until one or two in the afternoon. People treat us well. When they see us working, they sympathize with us. Even sometimes as the situation gets bad, they warn us or tell us to go home and run for cover. Our income is low. We make a little more than two dollars a day. What else can we do? I am a farmer, but I gave up because everything is so expensive.
There isn’t any other job. If there were a factory, for example, or other projects to work on, it would have been better. We all work on a contract. And contract jobs never have salary increases, like permanent jobs with the government do.
They should bring more work to my city. I don’t get why they give the work to contracting companies, because they just use the security situation as an excuse not to work. No one has ever threatened me. They all know I am a garbage collector.
We have two markets in the city, the big market and the small market. In each one we have about seven garbage collectors. We have ten other workers who operate the trucks and go into the neighborhoods. Each truck has only two workers. They can’t really catch up because the size of the garbage is huge.
Still, at least I have this job. If only you could come and see how many people sit in the streets waiting for day labor! Some of the people working are employees of the municipality and have some benefits, but the rest of us live on the two dollars a day. At first they provided us with special clothes and badges that said in both English and Arabic we were garbage collectors. Now we don’t even have the badges. We work at our own risk. The Americans come to us sometimes and ask us who we are.
