The Chapel in the Heart's Bureaucracy, and Justice Is Not Blind, are two poems of mine related to my work as a therapist, and serving as a Child/Youth Mental Health director for Santa Cruz County in California. Both poems appear in the Summer 2008 edition of The Monterey Poetry Review.
Every year there is a great conference held at the Asilomar conference grounds in Pacific Grove in Monterey County…a gorgeous sand-swept Monterey Pine retreat. Children's mental health professionals, advocates, parents, youth, legislators all gather to learn and network together. The grounds include an old wooden chapel, which helps remind me that social change is rooted in more than policy and bills, but in the heart.
I've included copies of the poems below, in addition to the link above:
Justice Is Not Blind
The proud girl from Oakland
sits on-stage at the conference,
describes her normal day—
boyfriends shot at, one killed,
purse stolen, cell phone stomped,
avoiding drugs at the party. It is
the only life she has known.
It is why all the therapists are here.
Her life, a light flickering
across the bay, a golden gate, a bridge
America must cross to find
its blind heart.
The Chapel in the Heart’s Bureaucracy
At Asilomar, sand-swept Monterey pine retreat,
I enter the conference hall as I’ve done the past two mornings,
sit in my chair to hear a judge, or state official, or professor
discuss the despair of families, the toll of poverty,
the statistics of decay. By the second sip of coffee, I notice
that I recognize no-one around me, that the speaker is dressed
in robes with a purple sash, a black preacher
just warming up his sermon—the power of love, the way of sin—
and I sheepishly look at my program to locate
my own plenary. But really, I don’t want to leave,
don’t want to hear legislative analysts discuss
the latest school funding crisis, or suicide’s stain,
or how prison’s gobble up disaffected youth
as the only university we afford them.
I want to feel the word sin seep across every budget cut,
the word love lilt its way into the vocabulary
of every director, every politician, each voting citizen.
So when at last I find my own conference
in Asilomar’s original chapel, hear a state director
say his own son was denied health insurance
because of depression, I wonder about the heart
of this country, if it is the wrong liturgy we chant—
one of policy and politics rather than love’s bare sound.
Hear the bell ringing twelve tones in the chapel’s steeple
as it ushers us out as secret missionaries
to a world weary of love’s absence,
of sin’s bureaucracy, a world waiting
as a lover once abandoned listens
for the door to open.