Have you heard?

Have you heard the stories
Have you heard!?
Have you met the unemployed
competent folk who’ve come obsolete?

It’s no wonder the jobs are leaving
We do business with people we don’t know
we eat food from people who don't grow
we don't value each other
The people we live with,
we give our value away
in money
Who would’ve thought, hey?
The person I pay
Is the person I value.

But what if I don’t know
If the cashier
At the grocery store
Is only a person in a system
That values machines
Who don’t care for coins
And let their owners take their share.

Why is it that
the fewer people with work
The better things work
while we look for work!
And we don’t
Save the seeds
Plant the seeds – nurture the plants
Pick that fruit
Drive the produce and stock the shelf

Where’s the democracy when it’s not human energy?
There is silence in machine fed food
Dinner conversation prepackaged and artificial
Compared to prayers sown with crops
Seasons pass like family reunions
welcome back asparagus
that conversation is a celebration

And winter is less joyus, in my opinion
When food comes from outside the home
Negating The joys and magnificence of a root cellar
Of those well stocked pantries
Glass holding summer’s sunshine
Strawberries – tomatoes
Carrots in sand – piles of potatoes

Cows birth
Milk comes again after we dried her up
Healthy calf soon to be playing in pasture
Makes the others look so old

A glass of milk can be so many things,
Jam on toast
The dry smell of wheat fields
late summer

I prefer prayers made with dirty hands And dirty knees
Surrounded by plants
worshiping life with my life
There is so much life
Surrounded by plants

I live
Surrounded by plants

So have you heard

Have you heard people are losing their jobs
Our places within the machine driven paradigm

And we still buy food from away
Wearing clothes from away
Or worse yet
From machines others own
So let's choose meaningful work
and let this work be for our real needs
Let it be because people
Are doing the work they have reason to choose
And to trust in the love of each other
To be whole in this world which we belong

I think we need more people doing less
maybe if we deny comfort as sonsciousness
so we can get over what it may mean to work
and enjoy ourselves as beings, not employees of jobs

Have you heard
Have you heard that people are remembering
That there are good ways we’ve known for so long
And just now

When we listen
Life may remind us
That all of our lessons
Are waiting for us
here
-2009