October 1999
Animal Law Cited by
New York Times
By Melissa Chureau and Jonah
Paisner
This Month: Welcome!
By this point in your reading of this small paper, you have no doubt enjoyed a welcome to the law school, the study of law, as well as the Letter of the Law itself. Glad you made it. Now that you've landed in this section, you can relax, put down your highlighter, and take a break from some of the dizzying effects of studying the law.
This marks the second year Poetry Notes has blessed/burdened the law school in its proud 114-year tradition. Of course, you might ask "what does a law school need a poetry column for anyway?" A suspicion which may be compounded when in this issue you find two somewhat average poems written by none other than the poetry editors. With that, your first lesson: self-expression and ego gratification are each necessary and healthy aspects of life here.
Enough about us, let's talk about you for a minute (as one popular modern-day singer puts it). Why do you even need poetry? When we say "ego gratification," did you think the idea was for you to rattle off an incessant barrage of useless, nonsensical hypothetical questions from the back of the classroom? Well, perhaps. This section of Letter of the Law is committed to providing a creative outlet for you to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, and dash off some NON-required lines.
Hopefully, our arguably humble attempts set the stage for the low-key, anything-goes flavor of this enterprise. With that said . . .
Send your poems, if you dare. Drawings, cartoons, and photography also welcomed. Hey, if you've got songs and sculpture, there's room for that too. The idea is for us to encourage each other, in an overall effort to stay happy, with it, and looking forward to waking up in the morning. And eventually, our vision is to take our various forms of poetry—verbal and otherwise—beyond the paper and into the larger law school community.
Do. Re. Mi. Fa. So. La. Ti. Do.
Smile
Consider if you will, a thing of beauty surpassing all others in its simple magnificence: the smile.
Sure, there's the smile after someone quips cleverly, or how you laugh at a side-splittingly hilarious joke.
These are great fun, add pleasure to our lives.
But how about the smiles that ROCK us, that cause a shiver to run down our spine?
I'm talking about the smile of a child offering a flower held in out-stretched arms to the tank commander with fire in his eyes and fear in his heart. I mean the smile that appears on the face a new mother, embracing her baby girl for the first time, so bright the smiling is contagious.
An eldest daughter receives a standing ovation with deafening applause at the close of her valedictory speech, her father's smile is bursting, holding back tears.
Oh, the rainbow smile of the teacher when her hardest working, underachieving student score perfectly on the exam. The smile of bliss on your lovers' face knowing that you will be there to wake with her.
Perhaps the most glorious thing about the smile is not its occurrence in response to some moving event, but how smiles can create change in unbelievable ways.
Like a smile that gets strangers in elevators smiling; Or a young man paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair who reminds his parents that all their efforts are not in vain, he lives life with joy and hope.
So it is with the smile of a waitress who really has her heart in it; you think nothing of a 30% tip.
And what do you think about those smiles that you feel like you are going to cry and then your heart pours out. Soon all those around you join by shedding slow tears.
This is the ONE emotion that can say so many pages of exquisite words all with less time and effort than it takes to draw a single breath.
Among different races and colors
and customs and heights, weights, eras, and countries,
a smile always means the same thing:
Trust, Love, Joy.
It doesn't cost a thing, so use that powerful part of your humanness to cause a ripple of change, and recall…
There is NOTHING that your smile cannot do.
Jonah Paisner 1991
The Living Room
Sound of a motor outside, it's
humming,
an occasional explosion of a stick, a once in a while
surge—
perhaps it's a saw, cutting, cutting through something
but it's constant, and that's all that matters.
Some cars go by, then trucks, then vans, everyone
moving in a straight line past my apartment.
It's small, noisy, old, but it rests high, about halfway
up
the trees outside.
And there are many trees around
here—
one right up against the living room window— a few
branches move with the wind, and at about every third
movement or so, the bells twinkle from the chimes
outside.
Most of the leaves on the tree are
dead and haven't blown away yet. Amazing how they've
withstood the gusty winds, the magnificent rains— that
even in death they cling to what they know. And the other
trees, they're farther away, at least two or three houses
from here. And most of them are clustered together, as in
cliques, but a few, like the tree outside my window, stand
alone. Some branches carelessly intertwine with the electric
wires which cross in front of the windows,
seeming sometimes like prison bars; sometimes I forget
they're there, at others, I resent them wholeheartedly
and wish I could reach out the window and tear them
away from view.
And even these wires seem to have
lives
of their own; they too move and some are far higher than
others, streaming across the blue of the sky— and
others stretch low, dangerously low. But there is still a
sense of order, some kind of order. From the living room
window,
I also see rooftops, one smoke stack very close.
I never see smoke come from it. It is barren,
cold.
And beyond this, I see the
artificial blue of tarp
draped carelessly over one roof, I suppose to keep
out the rains that will come soon. And it's under
this roof that I often hear the nursery's phone
calling for inventories, supplies, service up front.
Once in a while I see people in the not too far away
distance walking down the street—
always with a purpose, always going somewhere.
Do they know I can see them?
Do they look up?
I don't think that motor's humming
will go away,
nor the frequent telephone ring at the nursery.
Perhaps the roofs will go first, the smoke stack
will crumble away, the tarp will blow off into the nearby
grove, and maybe the cars will stop coming down this
street—
just for a moment, just long enough.
Or maybe a wild storm will take the wires away,
whip them away from my view— just for a moment, just
long enough.
So I can hear the silence, reach for the sky and run my
hands
through the tree branches like hair and watch
the leaves blow gently away.
Melissa Chureau 1998