Brandeis and the Light He Let In
They said the walls were gleaming -
transparent as justice should be,
sunlight bounding through glass façades,
account books lay barren
akin to scripture in a republic of reason.
Yet he could see the fractures.
The fine-print footnotes.
The one-way mirrors.
He entered solemnly,
as to not disturb the peace.
A slender man amidst thick corridors
uninvited by Wall Street
yet to exacting to dismiss.
Brandeis listened -
to loom-tied women
and soot-veiled miners,
to murmuring clerks
with stiff wrists and crooked backs.
He gathered their words like he would filings
absorbed by the magnet of duty and diligence.
He made the law speak human.
He made reason evoke morality.
The Brief was not brief -
pages rife with studies,
arguments carved from lived days.
He argued not from precedent,
but from people,
from lungs and tired bodies,
from callouses and affection.
They called him dangerous.
Unpredictable, an anomaly
Not because he sought to burn the house down,
but because he knew where the wires met
They said he was too Jewish,
too unorthodox,
too susceptible to the outsider's truth.
Yet he stood firm.
A sentinel, unyielding.
He became the first
without becoming the exception.
His robes were not armor but fabric.
His mind, not fixed, but everchanging,
He danced with the law,
among the people, with the people
anchored by a belief.
Justice must not solely rule.
It must breathe.
He warned us of bigness,
not from fear,
but from faith in the dignity of the small.
He said privacy was the right to be left alone,
yet he never turned his back.
Brandeis walked the paneled halls,
glimpsed through the gilded façades,
and when his steps fell silent,
he left a trail in glass.
Let there be light.
And let it be just.