BALLAD OF TAMPA
When after dinner you smoke, gentlemen, remember
Tampa leads the world making clear Havanas: l\1exicans,
Cubans, U rugayans, Porto Ricans are your vassals;
Ybor City, Palmetto Beach, West Tampa sweat, ache, starve,
For the azure smoke-ring exciting tonight's new lay.
Dull-eyed sallow elderly women stand confuted
In the factory-tomb banding, wrapping, boxing.
Machines monotonously clock the minutes;
Gossamer of cellophane automatically embraces cigars.
No, ·
says the woman-worker,
I don't count cigars packing;
There's no time, no time; we get used to it;
One look tells us how many there are;
No time
. . .
no time
. . .
no time.
Bastard houses, colonial and Spanish, lean
Over Ybor City's Ilarrow Seventh Avenue, memorial
Of antithetic races flowing to the New World's shores.
Here the home of Tampa's proletariat winds its lank
Streets under balconies. Labor yokes all races; voices
And awnings shout Martinez, Cohen, Carducci! But 0
Beloved flaming faces of Latin America, passionate
And stern, whose eyes burn with remembrance
Of a hundred battles with the world wide foe.
Going home, gentlemen, we find
110
architecture;
Home is an old broken wooden box patched
\Vit'
,tin or paper, naked within, maybe a hard cot;
Maybe, 0 petit-bourgeois luxury, even two; maybe
A decrepit icebox, a table limping on three legs;
Shacks whose faces grow black with worry.
Where will the rent-two bucks a week-come from?
The workers, having forgotten under the chronic
Fake smile of the Blue Eagle the feel of l:tbor,
Do not recall the names of conquistadors
Who first touched Tampa's shores; let the Chamber
Trumpet to a posterity of tourists the memory
Of Pamfilo de Narvaez, Hernando de Soto,
IS
