Justice on Sundays
Sundays were always strange days
Never work and never play
Always sing and always pray
Always must and never may
Never doubt – or never say
Always live above the fray
Of tears and fears and never pay
A passing thought to justice.
Sundays were always hard days
Hard shoes and hard clothes
Hard faces of hard posed
Folk with stiffened hard kept oaths
To a very distant hard, closed
God who, with hard grace, was proposed
To have what seemed a tough, hard nosed
Exacting sense of justice.
Sundays were always tight days
Tight shoes and tight pants
Tight schedules and tight plans
Tight hearts and tight little bands
Of tight friends in tight clans
Tight minds with tight stands
On tight questions – No shifting sands -
Just a hollow sense of justice.
Sundays were always straight days
Straight shoes with straight laces
Straight rules and straight faces
Straight men in strait places
Straight mothers in strait traces
Of strictly silent straightened graces
Straight prayers, Straight stares
Which silenced me, and any thought of justice.
Sundays were always dark days
Dark shoes and dark ties
Dark songs hid dark lies
Dark answers to my dark ‘whys?’
Dark glances, and dark cries
From this dark soul; with darkened eyes
Amid a darkening guilt, God, I tried
To stand your ground of justice.
Sundays were always false days
False images and false ways
False words in false praise
False thoughts, a mind in haze
Guilt and ache, innocence razed
False deeds, a soul a mazed
False confessions, spirit crazed
And lost inside, my silent cry for justice.