Fleda Brown: Child Labor

Child labor is desperately sought by both the manufacturers

and the starving children. Morality is another one of those words.

Sometimes there’s a haze of words, sometimes a fog. My breath

is one of the two. The palm of my hand is a shallow lake,

enough to hold stones and lose words in. The world is held

in God’s hand. We sang this on the spillway at church camp

as fingers of water spread out below. True, the earth’s crust

miraculously hangs on against the breath of all our talk, our tossed-

around ideas. Factory workers and children still forage in the dumps

at Phnom Penh, and under them, rats and bacteria eat away

at the garbage, and below everything, the earth’s core swelters

in its own juices. Isn’t it odd that we knew hell was down, heaven

was up, before we knew about the core? I would like to discuss

the consciousness that mumbles to itself so that it won’t hear

the hum of sewing machines in the vast rows of warehouses,

and the children’s pleas for bathroom passes. How consciousness

skips along on the level sidewalk of words as if it were headed

to a picnic. Heraclitus says everything is fire. We have lit a fire

in the barbeque pits, and the thighs of the large people who shop

at WalMart are on fire, but they can’t help it. Things got heavy

so fast, to the point of combustion. It was the corporations who

got the children to make the T-shirts, it was the luminous ads

in the Sunday Times that sold the shirts, it was the carefully placed

words in the ads, God, we are all jabbering away while hell

cooks the hot dogs and heaven rains the iced sodas, and along

the banquette are the pump dispensers of ketchup and mustard.

—

Copyright 2013 Fleda Brown. From No Need of Sympathy, BOA, Ltd., 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Filipino child laborers work in a charcoal dump in Manila, Philippines, July 9, 2012.  (Dondi Tawatao/Getty Images)