Ode to the Panama Canal

(Part One and Two)


Ode to the Panama Canal
((Lift up your brows) (Part One))

Left up your heavy brows, your locks
your waters from North to South;
lift up your heavy locks that empty
your waters into the great seas:
the Atlantic and Pacific.
Lift up your brows, and allow
the ships of the world come and go;
to cross the mighty opened winds!
You are America’s engineering feat
the greatest of the 20th Century;
You are the Panama Canal…!


Written: 5/22/06 #1351/Built between 1904-1914; the city of Panama dates to 1519 AD, a World Heritage Site; written two days before I went to the Canal; reedited 10-28-2008


The Big Ditch
((The Panama Canal, 2006)(Part Two))

An engineering wonder of the world,
equal to 6000-warships;
six pyramids by the Gaza strip.
With all its tunnels, and locks:
dams, lakes, buildings, mess halls,
bridges—structures, spillways—
bulldozers, trains, and much more,
fifty-one miles of it, and ten-years.

Excavations, constructions—
like: digging a big ditch, through
mountains, valleys, lakes and all:
and all I can say, is immense—with
its tons of cement and steel,
between silt and mud; and two
oceans between, noting, I say
nothing was an obstacle!
Yet they came, one after another—
yellow fever, heat and disease…!

The Suez Canal is but a glimpse
of this immense task, the Panama;
unequal in everyway, to its grandeur.

Written in Panama, at the Canal, 5/24/06; #1360/Built at a cost of $675-million dollars, by 62,000 workers: today that price tag would be seven-billion, reedited, 10-28-2008