'Police are not generally associated with poetry'

From Portland Police Department read original poems at Thin Blue Lines by Danica Koenig

It is not often you get to hear the police officers of your city pouring out their souls in poetry they wrote, but on Thursday March 5 at the Portland Public Library the citizens of Portland got a chance to hear the members of the Portland Police Department read poetry they had written about what it is like to be a police officer.

The poetry reading, "Thin Blue Lines," was part of the Arts & Equity Initiative, which is a targeted arts project in which public officials improve their city through the arts.

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Some of the poems dealt with some pretty heavy material; one that was read by local poet Michael Macklin who worked with an officer was about the difficult situations police officers find themselves in and how it affects them.

One line read, "One crack bust, a suicide, then silence."

Later the poem asked the question, "How do you protect your heart?"

A couple of the poems incorporated real questions and comments kids of the police officers had asked.

One of the lines from the poem read by Michael Macklin was, "Who are the bad guys, Dad? How do you know? Who do you trust?"

In a particularly moving poem Don Hayden put together a series of questions his son had asked him and used it as his poem, all of them perfectly capturing that balance of childhood curiosity and fear toward police officers.

"Hey dad, put any bad guys in jail today?"

"Hey dad, are you going to put me in jail?"

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