If Aphrodite had been with them that day,
If he had been Aeneus
And his father
Anchises
He would have carried him
slug over his shoulder
down the narrow stairwells,
through the burning building.
But the gods
were not with him
that day,
Nor with the 146
young immigrant women
who must have cried out
in Yiddish and Itakian
As they smelled their own hair
burning.
Not Troy that fell that day,
instead a shirtwaist factory.
A dark and dingy
8th and 9th-floor nightmare
of a sweatshop
Where 400 had labored,
struggling with the new
language and culture
in which they found themselves
engulfed:
Easy victims of industrial greed.
Exit doors were locked,
the investigation proved.
The fire escape buckled,
collapsing beneath the weight
of no doubt screaming workers,
fleeing the conflagration.
Desperately
many lept from the windows:
Better to splat on the cement
nine, eight stories below
than to have flesh
burned off in the flames.
Later,
Isida Wegodner
would wander, dazed
praying that his father --
who he had somehow forgotten
as he himself had fled from
the burning eighth floor --
was somehow still alive.
Tears must have streamed
from Isida’s eyes
when the door of that train
slid open
And his father disembarked,
pants torn, flesh showing,
shirt ripped from his torso,
face dirty and blackened,
But somehow
still alive.
*On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
on the top floors of the Asch Building in New York
City burned. One hundred forty-six young immigrant
workers died in the fire. A young worker, Isida Wegadner
was interviewed by a reporter in the days following the
fire.
