Let’s just say we are builders of wagons. Yeah, cowboys building coffee wagons. Smart cowboys who had good hubs.
Even though the wagons give us plenty of problems to be solved, bonnets to be painted with advertisements, commercials to be played on screens out the back. But we were the best
wagon building team there ever was. We liked each other; we laughed a lot; we kept trying to improve our processes. We shared life tips and work tips and hiking tips and campfire tips. We were grateful for each other.
Ester would visit me every morning and we’d talk about our mothers or she would show me how to paint bonnets. Well, one surprising day they escorted her out of a wagon and sent her down the trail without so much a howdy do, after 28 years of painting wagon bonnets. And they expressed no gratitude for all her bonnets.
And for this, the rest of us felt grief. Elmwood picked up painting her bonnets but he never wanted to work on bonnets. Gwendolyn moved to another work team. Ernie stopped caring about the wagons.
And then Bruce came to tell us we weren’t even making wagons anymore and that we would be making something else. But we never found out what that other thing was and our systems were disassembled and all our projects were halted and no gratitude was expressed for all we had done.
And we felt grief for missing the wagons and missing Ester and missing our sessions of circling the wagons.
Entropy came and some cowboys began to feel more than grief, they started to feel grievances instead, grievances that Bruce and Betty and Barbara from Corporate never visited and never knew what making wagons was about. And after a while we couldn’t tell the difference between grief and grievances.
But maybe Corporate was right because nobody is selling ******* coffee out of wagons these days. Or trains or trolleys either. The work is nothing, after all that, but spinning wagon wheels. And all the wagons are melting right now in the hot, dry sun.
Work is the moments and nothing else. You can be grateful for that. Grievances will get your out the door. But your grief will never quit.
Prompt: write a poem about grief with tangible particulars.