Is it our fate as dedicated educators, activists, writers, to always be making a choice between our work and other supports of life? Looking toward the holiday’s promise of a day to concentrate on life, right? Or, is our work actually our life? Where do the lines cross? Where is the good life in our work? Where is the work in a good life?
As a writer and an educator (and a human being living my life), I am thankful for Marge Piercy’s poem.
“The Working Writer”
by Marge Piercy
I admire you to tantrums they say,
you’re so marvelously productive,
those plump books in litters
like piglets.
Then the comments light on my face
stinging like tiny wasps,
busy-busy, rush-rush, such a steamy
pressured life. Why don’t
you take a week off
when I visit? I spend July
at the beach myself. August
I go to Maine. Martinique
in January. I keep in shape
Thursdays at the exercise salon.
Every morning I do yoga for two
hours; it would mellow you.
Then I grind wheat berries
for bread, weave macramé hammocks
and whip up a fluff mousseline dress.
Oh, you buy your clothes.
I just don’t know how you live
with weeds in the living room,
piles of papers so high the yellow
snow on top is perennial. Books
in the shower, books in bed,
a freezer full of books.
You need a cleaning lady or two.
I saw a bat in the bedroom
last night, potatoes flowering
behind the toilet.
My cats clean the house, I say.
I have them almost trained.
In winter, we dig the potatoes.
All year we eat the books.
The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems 1980-2010