Hope is a Thing with Feathers....

...and so fragile it is. I am waiting for news of a new employment venture, having been bumped out of a job that I loved due to department consolidations and building mergers. I have been keeping busy, doing part-time work for the facility I was working at full-time, but a potential opportunity has arisen, and I interviewed for it last Friday. I am naturally a pessimistic person; positive thinking is not natural to me. In recent years though, I have become more hopeful, more positive, willing to believe that good things do come to those that wait, and believe, and hope. And so today I will continue to hope and wait, and build my plans on being successful in my ventures.



 

 

 

 

To be of use

 
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy, "To be of use" from Circles on the Water. Copyright © 1982 by Marge Piercy. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982) 
 
 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ellie@Home 2020 Summer Reading List

   Good Evening and Happy Memorial Day! This post is far later than I planned thanks to technical difficulties (sob, sob) but here it is, better late than never! The earlier version of this post was wry, witty, and weird, and I don’t recall any of it now on my THIRD attempt. So without further ado (or headaches) I’m going to dive in. I have 34 books for this summer’s list. Because I can’t order from my library, I scoured my shelves for books that I haven’t read or have not finished. I managed to come up with 28. I grabbed one of Josh’s books, and two of Liam’s, then on a whim treated myself to a copy of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and Angel of Darkness for my Kindle. Then, just when I thought I had enough (plenty!) Henry Roi from HellBound Books kindly sent me a review copy of The Horror Writer: A Study of Craft and Identity in the Horror Genre compiled and edited by Joe Mynhardt. This is at the top of my reading list, partly because it sounds really interesting and informative, a
Read more

Beauty for Your September Morning...

Image
To the Light of September By W. S. Merwin When you are already here you appear to be only a name that tells of you whether you are present or not and for now it seems as though you are still summer still the high familiar endless summer yet with a glint of bronze in the chill mornings and the late yellow petals of the mullein fluttering on the stalks that lean over their broken shadows across the cracked ground but they all know that you have come the seed heads of the sage the whispering birds with nowhere to hide you to keep you for later you who fly with them you who are neither before nor after you who arrive with blue plums that have fallen through the night perfect in the dew
Read more

Carrying On

Image
I hope this finds you and your loved ones well. My family has been fine during this stressful time, anxiety a little high but nothing debilitating, and certainly nothing we haven't been able to work through. Still, each day is an exercise in uncertainty, wondering if we are doing enough to keep ourselves and others safe, wondering if our luck will change, and what we will do if that does happen. We recently learned that our boy will not be going back to school next month (we weren't going to send him anyway), and now my husband and I are trying to figure out how we are going to oversee our son's virtual schooling while both of us are working full time. My husband has said that is the main topic of canversation in his workplace, as many of his coworkers are parents to school-age children and both parents are working. It is less of a conversation at my workplace; not so many of us have school-age children, though a handful have school-age grandchildren. Because I work
Read more