Plate scrapers, scrap tippers,
throw down your cloths.
Raise your ruined hands to the sky.
Rise up from the saunas of sunken kitchens.
Squeeze soap in the face of progress.
Pick up your brushes and take to the streets.
Leave the dishes piled high.
Point your thumb at the Chef de Cuisine
Leave the suds to the Sous Chef.
This is the day we come blinking into the light.
We’ll thump our boots on the tin plugs
of manholes and stand on our soapboxes.
We’ll blow hot and cold beneath
the taps of streetlamps. We are the damp,
the harassed, the lackeys of haut cuisine;
the rinsers at the Ritz, the dregs
of the Dorchester. We flick truffles from
tea sets and dish dirt where we like.
We are Les Plongeurs, the forgotten tribe.
Today we unite. Tonight, they’ll go hungry
in the ballrooms of London and Paris
while we dance in fountains and fishponds
beneath the gleaming dish of the Moon.
