Meditations in Fast Times: 36. If you apply for this job

Note to Readers: “Meditations in Fast Times” is a devotional writing experiment for the Season of Lent. Each day during the season, I am writing a poem as a meditation on, taking as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing his seminal work and others.

                37.


                                      If you apply for this job,

Regardless of your qualifications, you are starting from nowhere,
In any moment of any day, in any season, for any reason.
It will always be like this: you will be put off, or if hired, it is a case of

We own you, now. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, inform curiosity, be truly helpful

Or carry report. For minimum wage, you are here to kneel;
Our control of you has been made completely valid. And work is less

Than a reasoned order of protocol, the conscious occupation
Of the intelligent mind, or the skillfully measured speech.
With you, the dead are speechless; While living,

They could have warned you. Being dead, their frustration is

Sympathetically felt far beyond the language of the living.
Here, the timeless witness of the witless moment

Is everywhere and nowhere, never and always, endless.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen