In Praise of Strength!

Steel girders riding up, pushing up, into the cloud.
The workman goes up, the workman goes down.
His lunch-pail is steel with a banana and a sandwich.
His heart is bleeding from being alone in the air.
He looks out over cars driving, with a head of steel.
He calls down to the people, but no one can hear him.
He laughs with his friends.
At night his wife wakes him up to talk about money.
In the morning he walks to the subway and gives his toast to dogs.
He drinks too much with his friends on the weekends.
He has a girl on the side.
There are too many men like this, and it is all our fault.
Not that we could fix this, if we had all the power in the world.
We would make the same evil choices, if we had it to do over.
We want the freeways, and the advertisements, the crushed workman,
The dreary cubicles.
We really don’t like nature all that much.
We step on bugs.

His wife is not much worse, not much better.
She is not a good cook, but she is a mother at heart:
Looking down when the neighbors pass by with a stroller.
She kept her accent, to use with the shop clerks.
She kept her laugh from her nights on the town with her first love.
She opens cans with her mother’s can opener. She likes the red handles.
These hearts keep beating, and they won’t be done until everyone else is.
They know it’s all a joke, its all for nothing, but they keep doing.
She will have a baby, it will do for a while.
She will have it christened, and worry about college.
He will give up his girl on the side, out of guilt when the kid is born.
And they will become better, with laugh lines around their eyes.
Knowing looks will be the food of their marriage.
It will be years before any fruit comes of all this sacrifice,
But it will be real fruit, and no-one will take it from them.

And then there’s the spiritual life, which is no different from the religious one,
At least not for the lucky people.
Catholics, and they care about it, but what does the church do for them?
It works in quiet too, like their marriage, through their marriage.
I forgot that they were married in the church, she was a virgin.
God works through their weakness.
They don’t enjoy their life, not in the day-to-day, but their life fills with joy:
Like a blush fills a shy face.

These people are no different from any of us.
The college kids who are worried about pleasing their parents, or about getting a pretty wife.
The writer struggling to get something going for God knows why.
We are trying, aren’t we?
This world is mad: we are all on the hunt for what God wants to give us.
We sniff it out, though it is plain before our eyes.
This moment, right here, holds all.
But, we will never see this.
We just have got to keep on plugging.