How beautiful it is

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation.

you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object-look.

W H Auden, from Horae Canonicae. I love the spoken word, but not to the exclusion of everything else. Auden is right – you can see thought. And if you can genuinely get that 'eye-on-the-object-look' up on a stage or in front of a camera, the world will catch its breath.