by Jeff Hardin
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The Tennessee Senate on Thursday approved legislation that could subject churches and charitable organizations to lawsuits if they provide housing aid to immigrants without legal status who go on to commit a crime… Sen. Jeff Yarbro, a Nashville Democrat, noted the bill makes changes to a portion of Tennessee’s “Good Samaritan” statutes, which are designed to shield individuals and organizations that provide aid from lawsuits. “What we are doing here is we are literally limiting the application of the Good Samaritan law,” Yarbro said. —Tennessee Lookout, April 3, 2025 |
We finally got around to laws against
loving one’s neighbor. After all, feed
someone hungry, then ever afterwards
one should be accountable for any crime
he commits. Had he died instead, he
wouldn’t have crossed that yellow line!
There was snow on the roads, a dark night.
In another month, buttercups in the ditch.
None of us survives experiments going on
around us—a high limb nudged by wind,
a few words spoken in haste, others unvoiced.
A friend describes an island—secluded
but uninhabitable. Think of standing—
wind-lashed, unsteady, uncertain—on
ground knife-edged in every direction.
New weights are added the longer one
hesitates deciding which step to take.
Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in Image, The Laurel Review, The Inflectionist Review, and others. His eighth collection, Coming into an Inheritance, is forthcoming. He lives in Tennessee.
