21 March 2020 marks World Poetry Day.  We at Watson Ramsbottom would like to express our thanks to all the brave workers providing the essential services during this time and which make all our work possible. To the brilliant nurses and doctors providing care, to the marvellous store workers enabling our access to food, to our amazing emergency services, to the heroic dust-bin men collecting our litter, to the fantastic providers of public transport, to the homemakers, to the teachers, to our service-men and women. To everyone “who does what has to be done, again and again”. Thank you for everything you do.

Vina Madhavji, our employment law solicitor shares a poem – To Be Of Use by Marge Piercy – on world poetry day:-

A decision to proclaim 21 March as World Poetry Day was adopted during UNESCO’s 30th session held in Paris in 1999; the resolution talks about the power of poetry to unite, to transcend cultural boundaries and intensify international cultural exchanges and how through the written and spoken word we can rediscover basic values and to come face to face with ourselves.

A link to UNESCO’s resolution can be found here

To Be of Use- by Marge Piercy

 

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

 

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

 

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

 

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.