Ask the moon

A dear friend’s Dear Son…

…is incarcerated — a fifteen year-old, convicted as an adult for a tragic mistake that led to the death of another. Unjustly tried as a fifteen-year-old “ADULT,” Dear Son exists day by day as prisoner to our American corporate penal system. The prison seems intent on breaking his spirit, draining his life of all value, keeping him in our country’s incarceration system indefinitely – parole decisions carefully designed, for many, to be perpetually, “No.” Today as a young man of twenty (“Year 5” of incarceration), Dear Son suffers repeated abuse by prison guards; they make sport of creating traps for him, lying in wait to watch him fall, fall again, placed in “the hole” …again.

Where is love?

Follow the money, the profits, the commercial boon in prison construction, job creation for economically stressed rural communities. But where is the love for Dear Son?

I know he yearns to grow, develop his potentials, and indeed find how best he can serve society with generosity and good-will. Naturally it takes time, but today he needs a system that truly nurtures, sees him as a holy human being, encourages opportunities for self-development; in a word, Dear Son desparately needs love.

Where is there love? How can I love?

Why Are Your Poems so Dark?
By Linda Pastan

Isn’t the moon dark too,
most of the time

And doesn’t the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
“Why are you sad so often?”

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

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Image Credit: Photo by Marcus Dall Col on Unsplash