“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 live in law
wear its sound on my lips
hold my fingers in its sweat;
its sweat makes a river whirling with a foul smell
thinning my taste for its reward.
And, yet, I can hear in the rhapsody of its leaves and
branches
Lord, what kind of litigant is this?!
Perhaps something I threw in this river influenced its
direction
and that is very rare.
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.
Through the windy corridors of my mind
an echo reverberates relentlessly:
what I had not foreseen
was the gradual process
weakening the will
taking the brightness away
a war-time feeling
that limps and stumbles
and a heart that is dully bleeding.
Endless tear drops, heart forlorn,
these have been my heritage
in the toils of grief and scorn
I have won my little wager.
Endurance* is a monument, the splendor of
whose head a
crown of hewed thorns adorns:
A man of stone, whose faith has bled
his eyes look still
upon that beacon’d hill
where freedom, law and purpose
are fixed, yet flashing like a star.
A gloom of ancient city walls
has clouded its wings.
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)”