Living Law and 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