This System Has Caused Me Irreparable Harm
This system has caused me irreparable harm—
Yet still I speak your name in prayer;
I would have been anything you wished of me,
Soft clay beneath your careful feet.
I wandered once in erring youth,
In foolish shadows, small and blind;
Petty trespass against the world—
But not the darkness in their minds.
You gave me life—I gave it on
To one bright child of fragile grace;
She walks the earth because of love
That time and trial cannot erase.
Compassion.
This sorrow stretches long as years
Beyond the span that he himself dared tread,
Long as the ancient pilgrim host
Whom Moses through the desert led—
Toward a land he saw, yet never knew,
A promise burning overhead.
Grace.
As planets turn about the sun
With faithful, uncomplaining art,
So do you turn and look again
Upon the number 90-14869 and my heart—
Strange reckonings of guilt and blame,
Cold figures set apart.
Empathy not he the beast.
I did what youth in terror does,
When bruised by hands that were not kind,
Trying to cry without a voice,
To force the cruel world to mind
The brutality of a single man
Who should have sheltered humankind.
in Love.
Then is not now—yet children live
Because some souls refuse to sleep;
They guard the small, they tend the frail,
They sow where broken fields lie deep.
Without safe children, none grow whole,
And none return the lost to keep.
Change.
O good Woman, bright with light,
You who outshine the grievous day,
You lift the fallen into dawn
And show the trembling where to stay.
I am your servant in this hope—
Your friend, if I may say.
And if the world be hard and stern,
Still mercy moves in Magdalene—
A tenderness that walks through dark nights
And washes what has been.
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