It must be Simone Weil
who wrote, "Workers need poetry
more than bread."
Sounds like her. But try
telling that to the workers,
who if they work at all
we classify as non-exempt,
who are not bought
but rather paid for over time.
There is a prophecy,
its authorship in question,
that goes: some day
poetry will be written
by machines for machines.
“Poetry is a kind of money,”
Wallace Stevens said,
but not the other way around.
My friend Andrew has worked 10
years for Panera Bread
as a night baker, shifting
frozen dough blobs
truck to oven to tray, meeting
the exacting standards you
the customer demand
in quick service pastries.
Ten years on the job
and he could not make a loaf
of bread to save himself.
My brain tells me this poem
needs pineapples,
or at least a pineapple,
and I want to believe
it knows better than I do
what I (and by extension
my poems) need, but
I am hitting only forced
metaphors and fruit-drops.
Mrs. Malaprop used “pine-apple”
when she meant “pinnacle,”
that sort of thing.
How did the pineapple—
fibrous, over-priced produce
until 30 years ago—
come to symbolize luxury,
or simplicity-in-multiplicity-
in-whatever when
stamped in situ on cheap
mass-manufactured knickknacks?
The workers in the field
long for their transformations
but, innocent of genetics
and Photoshop, know nothing
of how to engineer,
much less market, a spiky stone
into a deliquescent ingot
of mouth-slavering gold
or how those tiny tools—
dodge, heal, smudge burn—
in skilled hands can
tweak anything until it looks
like a million dollars.
It must have been Marx who
said, without irony,
“the mind does not shape
the life but the life the mind.”
But a poem, no more machine
than a brain is a machine,
takes after bread in at least this way:
no one wants to live by it alone.
So when she asked me
if I’d donate to her good cause
and showed me pictures
of starving children—in America!—
who for the price of a latte
could get drop-shipped frozen
meat, vegetables and dinner rolls
and thus with full bellies
have X percent chance
of doing their homework
and getting a job and halting
(in its tracks!)
the unyielding cycle
of poverty swallowing Y percent
of my brethren every day,
despite my job and $200 boots
I told her no, and said sorry:
“I am not made of money.”
Though I’m not sure I believe it.
_______________________________
About “The Universe is Your Country," John Estes writes:
I would like to think, our political discourse—and political action—notwithstanding, that we are not purely economic beings in the financial sense of that term, but rather some part economic in the communal sense (the oikos being the household, after all). But as it is with people, I too think (and worry) too much about money, and this over-absorption in my own concerns keeps me from sufficiently reflecting or acting upon the suffering of others, who are all my neighbor.
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