Are My Hands Clean?
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I wear garments touched by hands from all over the world
Thirty-five percent cotton
Sixty-five percent polyester
The journey begins in Central America
In the cotton fields of El Salvador
In a province soaked in blood
Pesticide-sprayed workers toil in a broiling sun
Pulling cotton for two dollars a day
Then we move on up to another rung
Cargill, a top forty trading conglomerate
Takes the cotton through the Panama Canal
Up the eastern seaboard
Coming to the U.S. of A. for the first time
In South Carolina at the Burlington Mills
Joins a shipment of polyester filament
Courtesy of the New Jersey petrochemical mills of DuPont
DuPont strands of filament begins in
The South American country of Venezuela
Where oil riggers bring up oil from the earth for six dollars a day
Then Exxon, largest oil company in the world
Upgrades the product in the country of Trinidad and Tobago
Then back into the Caribbean and Atlantic seas
To the factories of DuPont
On the way to the Burlington Mills
In South Carolina
To meet the cotton from the blood-soaked fields of El Salvador
In South Carolina
Burlington factories hum with the business of
Weaving oil and cotton into miles of fabric for Sears
Who takes his bounty back into the Caribbean Sea
Headed for Haiti this time
May she be one day soon free
Far from the Port-au-Prince palace
Third World women toil doing piecework
To Sears specifications for three dollars a day
My sisters make my blouse
It leaves the Third World for the last time
Coming back into the sea to be sealed in plastic for me
This Third World sister
And I go to the Sears department store where I buy my blouse
On sale for twenty percent discount
Are my hands clean?