Living law, dead beacon

The idea of a living constitution
has the same forensic indeterminacy
as a committed dream.

I am content to trust this dream to the end
to have it fill my cup of hope all day and night.
I am content to receive its order
to hasten to obey without a pause.

But, the old voice sounds
unrelentingly in the chamber: Do not
compromise. Punish.
Crucify him.

The infirm musing of a perpetual dreamer
rising up with eyes wild for relief.

I am content with the terror and anticipation that
keeps turns by watching me:
Justice, once imagined, cannot be undone.

I have been left to think along these lines
to look for the abandonment of arcane unfairness
months after months.

The months
burn up as a fading lantern
homage to the majesty of the absurd:
A muse easy to bear, Camusian laughter to
suffering’s exalted well —
what single rule might break the dry spell?
Sometimes the unforeseen, the unpredictable
springs in the heart of justice
bending its way upward
again and yet again
towards a distant point
all unaccountably, into the strengthening clasp
of fresh now-born idea,
nearer to binding faith
than wild dismembering injustice.

When the far-distant element
of suffering humanity
looms out more clear;
the faint, far, complex notes of hope
its head moves near
and new flicks of justice’s well
unfolds beyond the known.

Is there any new depth to this well?
Say, what is its true nature?
Quietly nature covers over
the dying bird and the dead rover.
If justice’s dead, it is as though
a robin died beneath the snow
tucked away neatly, whose bright eyes
once stared with impudent surprise
at every tit-bit flung to her.
Now every season we must bear
to live without its whistled air,
for law lives beneath the Spring,
like a sequestered paradise
exiled from the steady hammer of faith,
a trackless rice field
ever trudging through groves of
crouching, unconquered territories.

Oh enchanted universe
conqueror of earth’s stadium
in your wild, singing glory
the faults you committed live.
Come hear my sharpened cries
surely, you can hear my note of crisis.

Ceaselessly I raise my cry.
My cry ascends and floats away
scattered by whirling winds afar.

* “Endure what you suffer as being a father’s punishment.” (Heb. 12:5b-7)

Author's note: written on the anniversary of Harvard's abuse of my human rights