THE LABORERS

I see them discharged at dawn from trucks filled with earth
(from which they come and to which they will return, in the end).
I see them bruised on scaffolds, scraped    
by ropes, hanging like bats from cranes.

They aren’t from here, their language is different. They will not live
in the houses they build. I see them in the evening
eating the bread of the sweat of their brows, extinguishing slowly
like the cigarettes that drop from their fingers.

I see how their spirits are felled by matter, their souls
leveled by bricks. Sometimes they sleep here at night,
without doors, in the skeleton of a home. Sometimes one of them
falls to the ground, to pray or to die.

הפועלים

הפועלים