Caregiver

A friend commented recently that my work had been "political," and I was struck by the difference between her remark and the remark of a Unitarian pastor who had described me as more spiritual than political. I had turned toward "economics," but not toward politics. I had spent time unable to find paid work in my training and wishing I had majored in Economics and Spanish, wishing I had studied Yiddish and become a translator, wishing I had mastered a language such as Chinese, but these were the wish for respectability earned inside the paid "force." The Catholic men had called me a cunt, a bitch, and a whore. They had leveled threats. We were to get along in "work" environments such as these, where no one, regardless of intention, was entitled to survival, to continuance ... our acceptance of misogyny at its common root that we were all "of woman born"-- in women displayed as envy; in men as hate. The caregiver was a "whore" who earned $15,000 per year -- how men and women were phrasing it. The talk about her behind her back; the resentment at her having food, clothing, and shelter. The pretense that what she gave the invalid for room and board was "sex," not "love," to make up for a lack of knowing or caring, to deny her access to any economy, to enforce the suggestion that only children were worthy of care, that the sick were unneeded and unwanted, that to love them was unnatural. That there was this green crop we were all attending of "children" to replace us at 30.

There is an atmosphere of "hate" that counters our religious tradition to love our neighbor. If poetry loves, then it is poetry to love.