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# Dignity
- URL: https://www.qntns.com/dignity/
- Published: 2025-10-12T14:42:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-31T16:43:36.000Z
- Description: For as long as you take breath from the breath I breathe, that your God’s balloons do breathe your breath, this body of some body’s womb...
- Author: Quentin Staley
- Tags: #fixed-lines, Poems

Dignity Poem

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For as long as you take breath  
from the breath I breathe,  
that your God’s balloons  
do breathe your breath,  
this body of some body’s womb  
from another body’s womb,  
from eons back,  
from tomb-to-tomb,  
till the time when we  
were same body,  
for as long as you are feeling  
of this world, as long as you are  
knowing of this place,  
as long as you are erect,  
flesh and blood, so we shall see  
Thee in Thee, giving our good  
Dignity. That dignity be good,  
our remembrance of why—  
which is not merely to live,  
but to celebrate life.

Dignity is to see all as dignified,  
that why not the sewage pumps of  
Earth be as regal as the thrown?  
Yet we bow before one and  
bowel before the other.

Our brother is  
trashed working  
the slop house,  
forsaken our adornments,  
our finest pigments  
and perfumes. We stripped  
ourselves our dignity.

Worse, the theft  
from one is fear  
of theft for all.

So to all, dignify.  
To all roles, all lives,  
all circumstance. Give to all  
our highest decorum, gilding  
equally the engine room and  
the captain’s bridge, saluting  
equally the privates and  
the majors. Else, in time,  
we bow to none. For all  
must be for one and  
one must be for all or  
none will be for all for  
none will be for one.  
  
In end,  
to give dignity is  
to know dignity, and  
to know dignity is first  
to have been given.

So for as long as you take breath  
from the breath I breathe,  
I give to you my heirs,  
my dignity.