Simone Weil: The Year of the Factory Work (1934-1935)
A glass of red wine trembles on the table,
Untouched, and lamplight falls across her shoulders.
.
She looks down at the cabbage on her plate,
She stares at the broken bread. Proposition:
.
The irreducible slavery of workers. “To work
In order to eat, to eat in order to work.”
.
She thinks of the punchclock in her chest,
Of night deepening in the bindweed and crabgrass,
.
In the vapors and atoms, in the factory
Where a steel vise presses against her temples
.
Ten hours per day. She doesn’t eat.
She doesn’t sleep. She almost doesn’t think
.
Now that she has brushed against the bruised
Arm of oblivion and tasted the blood, now
.
That the furnace has labelled her skin
And branded her forehead like a Roman slave’s.
.
Surely God comes to the clumsy and inefficient,
To welders in dark spectacles, and unskilled
.
Workers who spend their allotment of days
Pulling red-hot metal bobbins from the flames.
.
Surely God appears to the shattered and anonymous,
To the humiliated and afflicted
.
Whose legs are married to perpetual motion
And whose hands are too small for their bodies.
.
Proposition: “Through work man turns himself
Into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist.
.
Work is like a death. We have to pass
Through death. We have to be killed.”
.
We have to wake in order to work, to labor
And count, to fail repeatedly, to submit
.
To the furious rhythm of machines, to suffer
The pandemonium and inhabit the repetitions,
.
To become the sacrificial beast: time entering
Into the body, the body entering into time.
.
She presses her forehead against the table:
To work in order to eat, to eat . . .
.
Outside, the moths are flaring into stars
And stars are strung like beads across the heavens.
.
Inside, a glass of red wine trembles
Next to the cold cabbage and broken bread.
.
Exhausted night, she is the brimming liquid
And untouched food. Come down to her.
.
.
by Edward Hirsch
from Earthly Measures
publisher: Alfred Knopf, 1994