A "found" poem
by Fernando Saldivar, Julian Dufour, John Harris, Shannon Angle, and Kelson Vibber
I am a lead dishwasher.
Seven relatives and I
Assisted in my birth.
I am a complex combination of miracles:
A worker in the oil field,
The chemist at the factory,
The miner of graphite,
And a child in a first grade classroom.
And don’t forget the ancestors
Who helped transport
60 carloads of hemp
From Mexico to Mississippi.
I, Pencil, simple though I am,
Would rather be french fries
And a side of ham.
(Milton Friedman as interpreted
by Leonard E. Read)
Special thanks to Julian Dufour
October 1993
This was written by a group way back in a high school economics class.
Except for the last three lines, every phrase was taken out of context from an article that used the manufacture of a pencil to
show how many different parts of the economy depend on each other. The form is called a found poem because it is
found in the article.