Lunch Pails
…architecture, anatomy, and physiology
Earth is the first drudge. It gives seed, water, air, dirt, fertilizer. Animals, plants, minerals.
Such enrichments require harvesters and cooks who then enable laborers’ agency.
Wheat, the staff of life, is employed unseen as bread for sandwiches in lunch pails of
makers.
So, traveler, in places new to your eyes, see beyond architecture. Question patterns, structures.
Find residual energy blueprints of past actions. Adobe bricks, swaths of ancient mortar, axes swung on venerable oaks, iron lathe-turnings, widow’s walks, buttresses made to fly by hands of
laborers.
Consider the locale of any home, office, market, school, church. Ask it to reveal its organizers.
Hear its reasons, its monetary exchanges, its material agreements.
Do its math. Taste its geometers. Read its etheric contract. Respect its quanta of
craft.
Ideas, plans, creations are buildings’ reality, traveler. They await your survey and conversion.
Let rise in the paralight of imagination how a building was cast. How are you cast with it?
The words of your answers line foundations, each one fueled by food. Nourishment for toil —
provisions.
In every human-built structure, look to wheat. From there, thumbs, palms, fingernails, knuckles.
Oh traveler, honor the fuel that built the builders and the buildings.
Hear lunch pails’ packed cantillations of taste, digestion, muscle, construction — the melody of
work.
NOTE: Thanks to the staff at The Bear River Review in 2024 for publishing this poem. The University of Michigan-LSA’s support of poets and writers is magnificent.
