I read and read and read and watched movies and read
articles and learned so much.
One of the things that was particularly horrifying
to me or out of a million things that were particularly
horrifying to me, one of them was
that many of the prisons in this country
are scaling back on allowing reading materials in.
OK.
I could say why that's bad.
I hope you all understand why that's bad.
I am a poet and a teacher of literature.
But I wanted to write a poem that tried to make that point.
This is called "Corrections."
"Can a visa still ease a book across this barrier?
I charge the guards to drop defenses
in the face of twice cruel loss.
Where the pen excludes the pen, liberties at a double remove.
Must prison trap the soul with the body?
Let folks be free to think at least.
The captive mind preserves its muscle by working out.
If we crop the scope of thought to fit a cell,
its curve, allowed to grow again,
will likely tend toward return.
Move inmates to shape a slope that bends toward justice.
Pay their debt by spending time reading way past
where the yard stops and learning
sentences that end with hope."
Somehow that was a sonnet.