Are you useful? Are you productive? and a poem by Marge Piercy

I pray daily that I will be useful. I don't mind work, if it is productive and helpful, and that ranges from house chores to teaching, yard work and so on-- okay, dusting feels like it exists in a gray area (all puns intended). That said, the poet Marge Piercy has a lovely poem titled "To be of Use" that celebrates those who do the work that keeps things going. The final stanza says,

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.

Work that is real-- that is a good, solid goal. I teach in a school where most

kids are from working class homes, and they are already working at least one

job by the time they are sophomores in high school. They don't mind getting

dirty, but they do mind unfair or abusive bosses. That is a common topic for

most of them. They rarely quit those jobs, though, which is part of the ethos

they have been brought up in. 

Sometimes they have difficulty discerning where school tasks fit into their day,

and I understand that. Don't we all have days when there are just too many

things to do and not enough daylight hours to do them in? And it's hard, truly,

to tell a student who is both working in construction and is a volunteer

firefighter, for example, that reading the next couple of chapters is important

to his life. I manage, but I also know that the work I give them to accomplish

is not as relevant to them. That's the task of the teacher in a school like mine

(and I suspect, in most schools): why are we doing what we are doing? What 

practical transfer is there? 

But I want to acknowledge, to shine a spotlight, on things of cultural value.

Sadly, it seems that our entire culture is at a tipping point: what has marketable

value, whom does it benefit, and how does dance, music, poetry, painting fit

in, except as expendable extras? 

It's pretty heart-breaking. But note in the Piercy poem, that the Greek

amphoras have a "shape that satisfies, clean and evident," and the Hopi vases

are in museums. Beauty lasts past practical purpose sometimes, too.

Have a good day,

C