Working Class Hero
(for Amanda)
By Michael Ceraolo
The no-pain, no-gain cliche,
arguable in any event,
when taken out of its sports
context
and transported to a place
where it doesn’t belong:
the
workplace
I was out to dinner on a
warm July night
at a restaurant/bar east of
the city
The employees were wearing
black t-shirts
with the name of the
establishment on them,
and
one
of the servers,
her blonde hair tied up on
top of her head
and sporting a pink
headband,
was limping as she waited on
the tables in her section,
her head occasionally subtly
leaning
to one side or the other,
a tight-lipped grimace hiding
what would prove to be a
beautiful smile
when she was allowed to rest
for a second,
while,
outside,
at the covered-patio portion
of the place,
the usual suspects were
haranguing against unions
and all they stand for,
though
the unions weren’t the ones
responsible
for all the vacant storefronts
in this once-prosperous
suburb
(I didn’t have to go outside,
I had heard their diatribes
many times)
Later,
she sat at a table
tallying her tips at the end of
her shift,
then went home quietly,
an almost-unnoticed Ohio
stoic
It's just poetry, it won't bite
Working Class Hero
Michael Ceraolo’s most recent poem to appear here was Free Speech Canto XVII (February 2012).
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