“Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love, but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms from those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half our hunger.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

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Recorded Reading (1:13): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/bkj7ku5w8jc6xm24w8bm5/All-Our-Brothers-Bless.mp3?rlkey=2b2ht31djr15duaa3ancedrgw&dl=0

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All our Brothers Bless

Our laborers
Uninspired
Cannot rest when they are tired
Can’t spend a workday going slow
Can’t take a break their noses blow

Manufacture
Everything
Which to office workers bring
Of exertion unaware
Comfortable in a chair

As of old a seamstress be
Lectured most 
Complainingly —
(She strained her eyes but half the night
By destructive candlelight)

So our supervisors look
Down
With a scornful little frown
On those poor the luxury make
Which for granted others take

So we may
Proliferate
Garbage piles so very great
They don’t know now what to do
With them, do you?

This to the conclusion
Brings
We need many fewer things
And we need each other more:
Let’s stop keeping score

Trying to make some of us
More
Others of us to abhor —
Need to think of status less,
All our brothers bless

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This poet presently lives at a fraction of her nation’s poverty level.

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