Learning the Correctional Facility

Required to teach where rules are issued
in chits, passes, call-outs, call-backs,
no bathroom privileges during breaks,
I am tangled in the view
of razor wire scribbling on the margins.

Who can begin to memorize
the shock of bolts buzzed into steel and spine?
There must be another gate of entry…

Movement, guards call the march of transfer,
no proud posture but relentless daily
effort to pull forward

with no one in the bleachers to call out:
Hey!  That's my son, my brother; he's my dad...
Just names reduced to numbers:
06J44, report to the officer's desk. 

Shredding of evidence--

guns, drugs, assault, a man's best effort:
this the composition we must write.

Randall's narrative is personal,
condensed to a payback
for allegiance, a gang that left him
charged with all its weapons.

Greg outlines a process essay, three full pages
on how to make a ziti casserole,
its ingredients baked long before
the meat sauce starts to simmer on page two. 
Then comes pasta, boiled in conclusion.

First a father, then a felon,
at the age of 19 Greg begins to see
the need to organize.

Roberto writes another kind of process:
Year 1 of incarceration: visits, phone calls,
packages, letters from parents, wife, the children:
then Year 2, a slow eroding distance between
words, remembrance, and embrace.

Someday, one paragraph predicts, his wife will call:
It's been four years now; I'm still young...
In static pay-phone calls he hears it:
something she wants to tell him.

Revision started as a dull prewriting
exercise to find a common focus,
men in God's image trying hard
to learn their lessons and transcribe themselves
into effective sentences.

Here at the edge of town each week they manage
to break out and visit
for review of what we all rely upon:
the heart of the Law, its first requirement, is love.


The Sum

Take for example Paul, apostle-prisoner
who stocked a dungeon cell with psalms,
outlived the public lashes, stoning scorn
to cross a world's continents and timelines
with the news of a redeemed creation.

In mortal storm Paul prayed safekeeping
for his Roman captors, ship's crew grounded
on an island in the providence of God
where Paul, no longer young, bent down
to gather firewood, this least of acts

inciting venom and another proof of cure
to break the chains of every shipwrecked generation.


(These poems appeared in Saying Grace (1999) from Bellowing Ark Press.)

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Trees: Old Land by Nicora Gangi