Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Simic

A help-wanted ad disguised as a prayer: Simic turns a tiny domestic image into a critique of what we expect poems to do for us. The “needle” is not just a tool but a test of speed, skill, and maybe impossibility. Poems can be stitched into memory, recited, framed, taught. But to sew one “into a blanket” asks for something more bodily: warmth, shelter, a thing you can pull over yourself when the world gets loud or cold. The line flatters poetry, then undercuts it with the practical absurdity of the task. Who could make language behave like wool?

The subtext is need. “Wanted” signals urgency and scarcity, as if comfort is in short supply and the speaker is outsourcing salvation. It also slyly borrows the language of labor and commerce: consolation is a job opening, not a given. Simic’s wit is quiet but edged; he’s always alert to how the everyday object can carry historical weight. Born in wartime Belgrade and long attuned to hunger, displacement, and the hard comedy of survival, Simic writes as someone who knows a blanket is not a metaphor first. It’s a necessity.

Contextually, the line sits in Simic’s broader project: fables and one-liners that smuggle dread into the kitchen drawer. The intent isn’t to romanticize art; it’s to admit what we secretly demand from it. We don’t only want beauty. We want something that keeps us alive.