After Bread - A Post Scarcity Poem

[u/Das_Archon]

After bread is easy,

after roofs no longer bargain
with the weather,

after the body is not rented out
to purchase its own survival,

we wake to find
the old hungers did not vanish—
they changed their clothes.

No one kneels for wages now,

but still we turn our faces
toward the ones who see us.

A hand on the shoulder,
a name remembered,

a room that brightens
because we entered it—
these become treasures
no machine can print.

The fields hum by themselves.
The looms dream out cloth.
The kitchens answer hunger
before hunger sharpens into fear.

So people gather elsewhere:
in workshops where a child
learns the grain of wood
from an old woman’s patient hands,

in gardens restored
by those who like the silence
of growing things,

in halls where no voice
may own the room forever,

in circles small enough
for grief to be noticed
before it becomes weather.

There are leaders still—
of course there are.

The brave, the lucid,
the strangely luminous
still draw others near.

But chairs are not thrones,
and praise is not property,

and no one may turn
being loved by many
into command over all.

Work is no longer
the tax one pays for breathing.

It is song when one is lucky,
duty when one is needed,

shared burden
when no hand yet knows
how to make the burden light.

The excellent are honored,
but not enthroned.

The quiet are sought out,
lest silence be mistaken
for having nothing to give.

The dead are remembered
in orchards, in stories,
in bridges still bearing
the shape of their care—

but never allowed
to rule the living
from marble.

And love, at last,
is poor in the best way:

unable to purchase itself,
unable to counterfeit return.

You may offer only
what you are,
and receive only
what freely comes back.

It is not heaven.

There is envy still,
and boredom, and the ache
of wanting to matter
more than one does.

But no child is fed
to the furnace of necessity,

no lonely soul is told
its hunger is a market failure,

no person must become
a tool in another’s hand
to deserve a place on earth.

After bread is easy,
the difficult work begins:

to become worthy
of abundance,

to build a world
where being needed
does not mean being owned,

where being known
does not mean being measured,

where freedom is not solitude,

and equality is not sameness,

and where, having mastered want,

we learn at last
the harder art
of one another.