Browsing through a book of poems by D.H. Lawrence last night and came across this, which I’m sure I’ve read before and forgotten about. It may suit the ethos of this site!
Wages
The wages of work is cash.
The wages of cash is want more cash.
The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
The wages of vicious competition is — the world we live in.
The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle
that ever turned men into fiends.
Earning a wage is a prison occupation
and a wage-earner is a sort of gaol-bird.
Earning a salary is a prison overseer’s job,
a gaoler instead of a gaol-bird.
Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison
in terror lest you have to go in. And since the work-prison covers
almost every scrap of the living earth, you stroll up and down
on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking his exercise.
This is called universal freedom.
There don’t seem to be that many books of Lawrence’s poetry in print at the moment – mine is an old Penguin copy of D.H. Lawrence – Selected Poems. I presume Wages is in the currently available Complete Poems of D.H.Lawrence (Wordsworth Poetry) though.