Topic: After The Last Shift
After the Last Shift
In a few years, the machines may learn
the routes our hands have travelled for decades
the careful sums, the calls, the steady work
that carried rent from Friday into Monday.
Then someone will fold a work uniform
and leave a key beside the door.
The screen will keep its bright, untroubled glow,
the worker will step out into weather.
Where do they go when work goes on without them?
Perhaps first to the bus stop, then beyond
past shuttered shops and familiar clocks,
toward rooms where new skills wait unopened.
No map can name the worth of a person
by the task a machine can take away.
They are more than the hours they have sold,
more than the path that brought them here.
Still, a road begins with looking up.
They gave the world their very best,
And got nowhere, running hard in place.
They studied by lamplight, through fatigue and fear,
And earned the qualification they had dreamed to hold.
The paper shone; the future seemed at hand
Then came the bill, immense and cold.
They remember paychecks from the past
When hope still walked beside them, slow but strong.
They worked so hard to reach this threshold
And carry all that learning, and the now debt collectors come along.
Maybe communities can make a bridge of need.
And somewhere past the vanished shift,
a different kind of morning may be learned.
Will people carry on and be valued by more than what they earn.
What cup can hold the thirst beneath our names?
Not gold, but hands that reach across the dark,
A word that says, “You’re here. I know your pain.”
A welcome kept alight a patient spark.
And makes a scattered heart feel whole again.
