DNA’s Forever Imprisonment

What is forgiveness for those whose suffering of injustice will forever stamp them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. See http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/us/2-convicted-in-1983-north-car

DNA’s Forever Imprisonment
                                   by Odin Roark

Technology has released them.
Prisons are that much less crowded,
The streets now with lost ones
Wandering after decades of incarceration
Looking for…

Blame is not the game,
Science is both culprit and savior,
Bringing truth to bear,
To prove yesterday’s judicial tactics insufficient,
To ask our forgiveness,
To collectively be aware.

Men and women free now,
Their new kind of imprisonment ahead,
The shackles of resistance,
Of ignorance,
Of prejudice,
Of habitual thinking.

A society of collective tapestry,
Whose needle,
Stitch,
And finished fabric of time,
Finds itself pressed to adjust,
Think different,
See these falsely convicted prisoners,
As merely a you,
A me,
A next door neighbor,
A mistake with revelatory consequence,
The difference being chance.

How sad,
The years lost,
The memories confined to a cell,
The living that was held in check,
The contribution we’ll never know.

Yet…

All would agree,
It does pay to be in the right place
At the right time,
Even as such luxury
May not offer lessons learned
As well as those experienced
By an act of forgiveness.
 
There is the managing of acceptance,
Usually less by the exonerated,
Than by us.  Reminding us,
How locked we often remain
In our prejudiced inability,
Unwilling to embrace change.
.