A man heaving a pick will not tolerate a fool’s laugh,
nor take to a man leaning on a shovel watching as he digs
Why, then, did we look at each other and laugh
on an afternoon of freezing rain as we hurried
in three-piece suits, cashmere overcoats, colorful mufflers,
to appointments inside buildings with marble floors,
at men in hard hats and heavy laced boots,
men dressed in winter jackets and thick mittens,
their breath as heavy as gases escaping manholes,
men grunting as they lifted and carried long black pipes?
“Glad it’s them, not me,” I think one of us said,
no more complaints about desk jobs,
the pressure of deadlines and quotas,
the next CEO change, the next market report –
“At least we’ll be dry and warm”
I was glad too and yet I wondered about old uncles
on farms with the same solid faces of those men,
biceps a woman could admire and know they hadn’t
been gained in a gym with a trainer in tights
In a thousand years when we can no longer dig without robots,
when we’ve forgotten sweat and the smell of the fields,
when what we eat and drink will be manufactured not grown,
we might need men with picks and shovels, pliers and screwdrivers,
axes and plows, nails and wrenches, hack saws and planes,
men who know how to use them and make backhoes work,
a lost civilization to be dug out of the ground, their artifacts
admired by school children and hung on museum walls
“How foolish we are,” I thought later that day
staring out a thirty-story window into the haze,
“We men of soft hands”