Meditations on Breaking the Law
by Rose Marie Berger | March-April 1996
If we could split ourselves
like a crack in the cement
(children's names written when wet
a heart a flower a handprint)
like that mystical bread
(calloused hands ...
If we could split ourselves
like a crack in the cement
(children's names written when wet
a heart a flower a handprint)
like that mystical bread
(calloused hands holding up hunger
and night sweats and the one we once loved)
we would say in our first voice: Law
and Order out of Chaos
we would listen and obey what is right
teach our children to look both ways
(packing ourselves in a bubble
paper wrap-safe for shipping
from this world to the next)
and this would be good and called for and proper
but sometimes we would say in our second voice:
Marcellus (age 9)
Marquita (age 6) Titus (age 5) Regina (age 13)
Debbie Danisha and Diante
it would be a candle song in the dark times
and when the winged parts of our democracy
begin to topple off the pillars' heads
crushing more than names on the threshing
floor of the Rotunda
and when to be a citizen is to be an autumn fawn
caught at night in oncoming brightnesses
and when the only hand that can reach out
is the one that has already been reached to
once before in a cold creek, in a white robe
then indeed those hands must reach
because what seemed all order is chaos
it takes a delicate hand to hold the brush that daubs
in the details of a country, a hand not weighted by a weapon
(for such are the tools that construct chaos)
and yet with both tongues we would praise the balance-
that golden thread is all that holds us in the end
Rose Marie Berger is a pastor of Sojourners Community in Washington, D.C.
