marco@blog.luyckx.dev:~$ cat made-by-other-hands.md

Made by other hands

· Poems

$ git log --follow made-by-other-hands.md 1 edition
v1 2 Sep

First published.

Second button from the top,the one I check before I leave.

Someone put it there.

Before the hand, a press. Before the press, a mould.Before the mould, someone deciding four holes hold better than two.

Higher up, the glasses: someone groundthe exact amount of wrong out of my eyes.

Back left, a filling. Someone’s afternoon,and I have chewed on it for twenty years.

On my arm a dimple like a thumbprint pressed in clay,and behind it people who worked out what I would never catch.

The bread was ready at sevenbecause someone I will never meet got up at four.

The water I drink I have never once checked.That is somebody’s whole working life.

Last night the street stayed quiet enough to sleep in.Someone sent the trucks down another road.

None of them know it worked.

I sewed a button on once, myself.It lasted a week.

So I check the button, the last of them,the outside layer of a man

that strangers have been keepingwhole from the enamel out,

and it holds.

Six hands in a row: a baker’s with a loaf, a dentist’s with a mirror, a plumber’s with a valve, a road worker’s with a cone, an optician’s with glasses, and a bare hand at a collar doing up one button.
Six hands in a row: a baker’s with a loaf, a dentist’s with a mirror, a plumber’s with a valve, a road worker’s with a cone, an optician’s with glasses, and a bare hand at a collar doing up one button.

Why this exists

On 2 September 2010, at 11:08 p.m., Steve Jobs sent himself an email with no subject line. Nobody saw it until the Steve Jobs Archive published it in 2023, in Make Something Wonderful. It is not a poem. It is nine sentences, and these are all of them:

I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.
I do not make any of my own clothing.
I speak a language I did not invent or refine.
I did not discover the mathematics I use.
I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.
I am moved by music I did not create myself.
When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.
I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.
I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

He signed it, or rather his iPad did, “Sent from my iPad”.

The poem above is the same inventory taken sixteen years later to the day, by someone standing at his own front door. It borrows none of his items and all of his conclusion. Almost nothing that keeps a person alive and dressed and fed was made by that person, and the honest response, once you notice, is the last line of his note.