FEATURED WORK OF THE WEEK
Updated every Friday
The excavator pounds the unyielding rock
with a deafening persistence,
the stony hammering fluctuates in intensity
at the whim of the wind.
Working to the dictates of the concrete mixer
spewing out its contents,
a worker in a yellow helmet and clothes
covered in cement, head and nose
protected with a cloth, wheels and empties
the concrete into a trough,
another scoops it out with a bucket,
to hand it over to a third and then a fourth
on a ladder to be poured into a mould for a pillar.
Seventeen buckets to the minute!
Elsewhere, beam moulds are being filled
and a slab smoothened out in sweeping arcs.
Building sky-scrapers, podiums
and play areas for the rich,
sweating all day under the blistering sun, to return
to their temporary dwelling places made
of corrugated tin walls,
tin roofs and doors, with plastic sheets
on top of the tin roofs
weighed down by wooden sticks and bricks,
to dream of building for themselves
what they’d built for others!
Originally published by Editor Onkar Sharma from Literary Yard
Building for Others
by Dr. Elizabeth Vincent Koshy
RABBLE REVIEW No.6
Page: 23
