My manager at work is a poet, and alongside supporting each other with our (often frustrating) jobs, I really enjoy talking to him about writing and literature and our chats often end up drifting this way. He recently had a few poems published and when I looked them up, one of them particularly grabbed me.
Life Sentence, by Colin Campbell Robinson. Read it here (second poem on the page): http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202012/Jan%202012/colin%20robinson%20poems.htm
When reading this, I immediately thought of a man that I know who is on Death Row in Georgia; we have been penpals for about a year and the descriptions in this poem of the whispering of the man's neighbours and the mice remind me of how he describes Death Row. I'm intrigued by the links to religion in this poem and I absolutely love the links of the word 'confession' to both guilt and faith. My own confession is that I don't know if I really understand the poem, but as I've said before, I don't think that matters much: if a poem conjures images in your mind, if it reminds you of something, if it makes you think, if you like the sounds it produces, then that's enough for it to be good and to be worth reading.
I feel that there's something slightly accusatory about religion here, at least on the part of the prisoner if not the writer: 'they were guilty, he believed', with 'they' referring to 'holy men'. Maybe this is a reference to people who profess to be religious yet don't tend to act lovingly, kindly, in accordance with what their religion teaches? And what is the 'impossible project'? Perhaps the act of definitively deeming one to be guilty or not; perhaps it's all about perspective and that's why it's impossible.
That death is compared to being free at the end of the poem is sad, the sign of a life that has been imprisoned and wished to be over. The prisoner that I write to has not indicated to me yet that death would signify freedom for him; I think he still sees freedom as existing somewhere in life and he holds out hope that he'll find it.
And on that note, off I go to write to him!
