The Law In Crisis

The Law in Crisis

The gavel no longer sings in oak and iron,
it coughs.
A tired thunder rolling across tiled floors,
startling only dust and distant echoes.
In the high chambers where truth once wore white,
Justice adjusts her blindfold,
not to keep from seeing,
but to keep from weeping.

The scales tremble.
Not from wind, but from invisible fingers
pressing down with golden thumbs.
I have seen the Law
like a shepherd in borrowed sandals,
counting sheep that are not his,
while wolves draft constitutions in the dark.

I have seen the Law
like a river in drought,
its bed cracked with promises,
fish gasping in clauses and sub-clauses.
They say the court is a temple.
But what is a temple
when the altar sells incense to the highest bidder?
What hymn shall we sing
when the choir has pawned its hallelujah?

Once, there was a farmer,
he built a fence to guard his yams.
But termites came from beneath,
not over.
So he stood all night chasing shadows
while the earth itself betrayed him.
That farmer is our Justice System.

Once, there was a judge
who planted a tree of verdicts.
He watered it with statutes,
pruned it with precedent,
and guarded it with conscience.
But one season, the fruit grew bitter.
Not because of the soil, but because bribes were mixed in the rain.

O Law, daughter of parchment and fire,
when did you become a mirror
reflecting only the faces of the powerful?
When did your sword turn butter-soft
before the necks of giants, yet sharpen itself
against the wrists of the poor?

In the corridors, whispers breed like rats.
Files vanish like prophets in exile.
Truth stands outside, barefoot, waiting for a clerk to remember her name.
The constitution once a covenant is now flutters like a flag, stitched with convenient amendments.
Its ink bleeds at election time.
I write this not as accusation alone,
but as lamentation.
For a house divided by loopholes
cannot stand against the storm.

The Law was meant to be a lighthouse.
Instead, it flickers guiding ships of privilege to safe harbors
while the rafts of the voiceless
split upon procedural rocks.
Yet still in the rubble of rulings and recesses
a seed survives.
For even in drought,
roots remember water.
Even in eclipse,
the sun rehearses return.
Let the gavel find its thunder again.
Let the scales forget the weight of gold.
Let blindfolded Justice
learn to see with conscience.
For when the Law is healed,
the nation breathes.
When the court stands upright,
the people walk unafraid.
Until then,
we remain
citizens of a courtroom in crisis,
praying that parchment
may yet become promise again.