Poems for a Stressful Day at Work: Six Quiet Minutes
The Journal · Pressure & Work
Poems for a Stressful Day at Work
For the minute you find between the desk and the door.
Some workdays do not let up. The inbox keeps filling, the desk fills with the next thing before the last one is done, and the only quiet you get is the minute in the parked car before you walk in, or the minute in the bathroom with the door shut. These are six short poems for a stressful day at work: not a fix, not a technique to manage your stress, just a few quiet lines to read in the small gap you can find. Read one. The rest will keep for the next hard hour.
One — The Parked Car
You are not in the building yet.
For this one minute
the engine is off
and no one is asking.
Breathe out before the door.
The day can wait that long.
Two — The Inbox
The inbox does not empty.
That is what it is for.
You are not behind
on a thing that has no bottom.
Answer the one in front of you.
The rest is just a number.
Three — The Desk
The desk holds today’s work
and yesterday’s, and tomorrow’s
creeping in at the edge.
You can only sit in one moment of it.
Sit in this one.
The pile is not the whole of you.
Four — The Bathroom Minute
The door is shut.
For sixty seconds
no one needs an answer.
Run the water. Feel it cold.
Nothing out there
moved while you were gone.
Five — Between Two Tasks
There is a gap
between the thing just finished
and the thing about to start.
It is small. It is yours.
Stand in it a second longer
than the day would like.
Six — Before You Go Back In
Whatever is waiting in there,
it is waiting whether you rush or not.
Set your feet. Feel the floor.
You are one person
doing one thing at a time.
That has always been enough to walk in on.
There is no order you have to read these in, and no number you have to finish. One short poem, read in a parked car or behind a shut door, is often enough to give a loud day a single quiet minute. The work does not get smaller because you read a poem — but the minute is real, and it is yours, and you can take it again whenever the day finds another gap.
This is calm, quiet-reading content — a place to rest your attention for a minute in the middle of a hard day. It is not medical advice, and it is not a treatment for workplace stress, anxiety, or anything else.
Free, to keep
If you would like a few of these to keep, the free reading is here — seven short poems and a five-minute audio reading in one calm voice, for the next minute you find between two tasks. And if staying with one moment in a day that keeps pulling you forward is the part you keep losing, Presence Is the Practice holds forty more, read aloud the same way.
A note from the Library: these poems are short on purpose. They are meant to be returned to, not finished. — Zen Roots, published by Ledgerstone Press.