Your beaches white, your service workers Black and Latina,
Your tourists only see cute cottages and condos
Along the beach while ghetto-barrios sprawling
Beside the roads from the airport
Look like they're caught on blurry, intermittent film
From the air-conditioned rent-a-cars,
The photos flickering at night with the cop cars' strobe lights--
On Gulf Boulevard, closest street to the beach,
People are going to work
In smoking, noisy, beaten-up pickup trucks and cars,
People who need the ocean's impetus
To remember why they're working for five bucks an hour
As the businessmen in Jags and Porsches pass them,
But they can't see the sea on their way to wait on tables,
Clean restaurants, breathe poison
While killing roaches so the tourists won't have to face them--
They can't see the sea
Except in choppy celluloid
Only glimpsed enough to know it must be water--
Hotels for the tourists block the view,
And only those rich enough to live right by the water
Can hear it, watch it, smell it, when they want--
No one is allowed to sleep on public beaches at night--
People who don't own a stretch of beach
Can never lie down in the warm white sand
To watch the stars and planes and hear the waves
Before they drift off unless of course
They want to chance a confrontation with the cops
Cruising down the beach in jeeps--
And cops are out at night along Gulf Boulevard,
Two cops per car, a car per mile,
And if you break the slow speed limit in a beaten-up car,
You're bound to be surrounded
By two loads at least of cops dedicated
To the protection of all expensive property
Along the beach from all suspicious characters--
The richer the stretch, the hungrier the cops--
You hardly see one during the day
When tourists on the beach outnumber locals,
But late at night, when all those tourists
Are back in their hotel beds tossing and turning
On their sunburned backs,
And only janitors like me, fishermen,
And other no-accounts are out in ones and twos,
Then cops show up like palmetto bugs.
I don't blame the working people of Florida
For its decline--
They've been subjugated
Like the water, land, and wildlife
By Spanish and English colonizers first,
The likes of Flagler, Plant, and Disney,
And their present counterparts--
GE and other DOE plant operators
Buying up and poisoning palmetto prairies,
Coastal plains and hammocks, and speculators and hoteliers
Buying up and privatizing beaches
Thanks to greedy, fawning politicians
Stripping , uglifying them,
While wrecking ecosystems forever--
I see the irony but not the humor
In the fact that I quit the steel mill
And moved from Pittsburgh to the Gulf coast of Florida
For geography and weather,
And twenty years before I ever saw the place,
USX bought all of beautiful Sand Key because they could,
And dozed off dunes and pines
To leave a raked and naked stretch for county beach,
Encroached upon by towering Sheratons and Radissons--
Every piece of Florida
Is for sale eventually,
And one day soon unless we stop them,
What's left of its land and water,
Without the deer and panthers, fish and birds, that is,
Will be sub-divided, malled, hoteled
Like every other city center,
Not to benefit the people of Florida,
As the businessmen say,
But to deepen their own pockets--
One day soon unless we stop them,
Oli rigs will tower off the Keys
And threaten barrier islands, coral, beaches, bays.
Oh, Florida! Already you lie nearly covered
In water slowly, surely muddied
By the excrement of your exploiters
And the excrement of those who love you,
But who don't own the sewage treatment plants
That could be efficient if profit were no object--
Oh, Florida! You're a beautiful woman raped,
According to your rapists,
Because you're beautiful and asking for it,
But they would rape anyone or anything
Moving with potential commodities--
Pine by pine and palm by palm they've shaved your head,
Excised your body with canals
And changed your circulation--
You're raped but still gorgeous,
Still resilient--what's left of you
The way you used to be--
Not because your rapists plant a tree or two--
The world is watching and they feel guilty
And want to fix your hair for all the cameras,
But more importantly to them,
Because the wealthy want to see a tree or two
Outside their houses to shade their cars and shame--
Your rapists want us to accept
How they've poisoned your aquifer lifeblood,
To ignore the fact that cute boutiques,
Where working people can't afford to shop,
Abounding in ugly, ubiquitous shopping strips,
Are squatting on the sandy ground
That used to sprout virgin hammocks and grassy plains
Harboring panther, deer, and birds--
Oh, Florida! You're not magical
Because you have a Magic Kingdom,
But because some of your water is still clear,
Your skies are still enormous, blue and ever-changing,
The Gulf Stream licks your sultry flanks
And the sun still graces you with his gaze
The way he graces so many Third World Caribbean places
Where working people can't make a decent living either,
But can visit the beach like a theme park on their days off.
-- 1990.
