Not the Law

They are not the law.
Nor do they make the law.
There is no law to break.

Some chains rattle on our wrists
Put there by unkind, difficult hands
And a desire to bring us to heel.

It is different in our bones and flesh
Where the drag of gravity or air breathed
Mutates and metabolises in our blood.

Inside us, long-chain molecules,
Complex hydrocarbons, wrap
Our being here with physics.

But, outside, whose raised arms stop us
On street corners or in doorways
Warning us with a word or a look?

They are the ones who uphold laws
Made by lawmakers in distant offices?
They are here; their rule is unbending.

On some of us, handcuffs rub and chafe
Like the prisons they imitate; they chafe
To remind us of duty, obligation and obedience.

Never mind our natural constraints:
Skin encircling flesh or, sinew holding the heart
In place and guiding its beating blood

Outside flesh, we are proscribed as if all the edicts
Of Heaven had fallen like blessed rain,
God-provided, into the grasp of the few.

But they are not the law, these people
Who forge iron-bound shackles from laws
Previously unmade to make them unbreakable.

And it is ourselves, incarcerated by habit and repute,
By common practice, ritual, whatever custom demands,
Who let the overalls of convention cover us in shame.

Meanwhile, the wind comes down with rain,
Cloud and weather, accidental circumstances,
To shrive us where we live and be the things they are.

For these others are not the law, nor do they make law;
There are no laws to break.

Only the approaching weather brings us instruction;
Be patient; wait beneath it for the whole of the law;
Hear its one commandment:
This too must pass.

© BH, 2017/2018

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Where this came from, I don’t know. It had languished since last year and probably was about the tension between human law and natural law. You know, the  rules we make up because we’re trying to control the world versus the rules by which the world works, regardless.

So here it is. See if you can make sense of it. I’m damned if I can. Damned if I can’t, I shouldn’t wonder.