A poet, a police officer 10/13/21
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Thought of an old friend, I'm not sure why. It was more than a decade
ago that I last saw him. Haven't heard from him since, but that
doesn't make him less of a friend in my mind.
He was a police officer, but he hated being a police officer. His
father was one, and his older brother was one. I think his grandfather
was too, if I recall correctly. I never asked, but I'm guessing he got
into the business for the most obvious reasons. Very little resistance
in a path that your family has known for generations.
Perhaps his problem was that he was a poet. Not the kind that writes
down words, but the kind that dreams and watches the clouds and loves
the wind. Can a police officer be a poet, or vice versa? Maybe so. I
know another police officer now who's a writer (at least in his heart,
and as an avowed wish.)
The issue with my old friend was, I think, that the weight of his
profession got into his soul. The grime of it. The ugliness of it. He
talked about an instance once, it was a sting operation with an
undercover officer acting as an underage prostitute. Things were going
well, until the arrest. In the car of the suspect he found some
religious items. He spoke with the man, and learned that he had been
in trouble with the law, and had been seeking redemption.
This troubled my friend greatly. It's not an ugly thing to seek
redemption, and it's not necessarily an ugly thing to slip up in that
seeking. Something else got to him, I think. It was his poet's heart,
and poet's mind. In those, he saw the world in black-and-white ways,
where the good did good, and the bad did bad. And here was a man, who
wanted to be good, to do good, but he was not doing good. Was this man
good? Or bad? Or is it really that simple?
I never spoke with my friend about this after he told me the story.
But I've thought about it. I think he was in the wrong profession.
Maybe he wasn't, and just needed to find his footing. Maybe we need
more poet police officers, I don't know. But I think, rather, that it
would be better if he got out and did something else with his heart
and mind. Maybe he already has.
