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Portrait of the Artist as a Lone Tree

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For Sion Jenkins

(Based on a murder case)
Click to hear (.mp3)


The rush to judgment soon obscures the truth
when death engenders prejudice and hate.
The man returning home again too late
was painted as the fatal foe of youth.
For fathers are a target for the law,
that likes to think its duty shall be done
by prosecuting each and every one
that falls in fortune's random, savage claw.
What is a life? If Billie-Jo could speak,
closed minds would still refuse to hear her case -
for we have been a patricidal race,
whose laws were formed to satisfy a clique.
Ten years, a wife, four daughters one man lost;
ten million pounds for hounding him, the cost.


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