My house is more than a century old and filled with handcrafted woodwork and leaded glass bookcases and windows so beautiful that some days I stop just to admire them. I wonder about the craftspeople who made them, and how many hours and weeks and months and years of painstaking work it took them, and for only a single purpose: to make something beautiful and durable that would last for hundreds of years, far beyond their own lifetimes. Something for others to depend on. Something to be nurtured and cared for.

The people who made my house are the opposite of people who move fast and break things –things like the idea of democracy–that others, for centuries, have loved and cherished and protected and given their lives for.

Work, by Robert W. King

The workmen over and above the fence
fit bricks, lift mortar, slap it accurately
in place. Guilty by sitting idle, I
imagine they envy my luxury
of doing nothing until I remember
the days I had my hands full of shovel,
the dragline plowing the ditch of a sewer
through a future subdivision and how
I pitied those who walked by our work
with no apparent occupation,
denied the pleasure of making something,
piece by piece—even if it would soon
be buried—they would depend upon.

Click here for more information about poet Robert W. King. This poem was first published in 2008, in the online journal Rattle #29. 
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