The more you Innocent—
The more you Thrown in Jail—²
Whatever crimes we’ve committed,
Much greater Crimes are committed by
The authorities who maintain the Prisons!³
Assent and you are sane—Demur you’re
Straightaway Dangerous—and handled with a Chain.⁴
Those outside dare not set foot in
Prisons for fear of disappearing into
Cells kept empty for them …⁵
Every Prison that men build
Are built of bricks of shame—
The vilest deeds like poison
Weeds bloom well in Prison-Air—⁶
Prisons do not disappear Problems:
They disappear Human Beings!⁷
The degree of Civilization in society
Can be found by entering its Prisons.⁸
Democracy, Freedom, and Progress—
Returned to their cells—are Incoherent—
When the Prisoner dreams of Light, is it
The same Light that Illuminates you?⁹
And they search him: in his breast just his heart—
In his heart just his people—in his voice just his grief—
In his grief just his cell—and they search his cell—
Just to find themselves in chains.¹⁰
¹ Mimi Thi Nguyen, Forward
² V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street
³ Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
⁴ Emily Dickinson, Much Madness
⁵ Katherine Anne Porter, Flowering Judas
⁶ Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
⁷ Angela Davis, Masked Racism
⁸ Fyodor Dostoevsky tr. Constance Garnett, The House of the Dead
⁹ John Berger, From A to X
¹⁰ Mahmoud Darwish tr. original, Earth Poem