This is Where You Work

This is where you work,
a broad desk, sometimes cluttered,
sometimes clean,
imagination and paperwork constantly vying
for control.

You forget sometimes, when,
scattered with drawings and mail,
the simple beauty of it,
the handwork of a man, long dead,
who carefully joined and cut each piece,
who, without computers or focus groups
trusted his own sense of perfection
to create something that, generations later,
with all the world’s bluster and change,
remains perfect.

It gives you hope, this desk,
that your own pursuit of ancient arts,
and the old fashioned habits
of listening to your own soul
will somehow remain, matter and live
beyond the moment of creation.

About this poem

This really is my desk. It’s rarely this clean. More often it is cluttered with paperwork, CAD drawings and spreadsheets, and on it’s better days, poems, drawings and art. I doubt my work, the stuff that pays the bills, will matter in 20 years. Perhaps, just perhaps, some of the other stuff will.

But either way, there is magic in the creation, be it a design for a studio, a marketing piece for a client, a sermon or a poem. And that has value.

Tom