The Scales of Truth: Justice in Ruins

In the courthouse steps, marble worn smooth by a thousand footfalls of the hopeful and the desperate, she sits enthroned. Lady Justice, her marble eyes bound tight with silk that once was white but now bears the patina of years. The bronze scales in her outstretched palm catch the afternoon light filtering through the grimy windows of the crumbling institution behind her.

Money falls like autumn leaves into the waiting pan,
Each coin a compromise, each bill a broken vow.
The blindfold slips—not from her eyes, but from our own,
And we see clearly now what we refused to see:
How gold corrupts the very air she breathes,
How silver turns her sacred sword to rust.

The courthouse doors hang askew on rusted hinges. Papers flutter from broken windows like desperate prayers cast to an indifferent wind. Inside, the mahogany benches are scarred with initials of those who waited—some for justice, others for its convenient absence. The gavel lies cracked upon the judge’s bench, its authority fractured along with the faith of those who once believed in the system it represented.

She does not speak, this marble goddess of balance, but her silence screams louder than any verdict ever pronounced. The foundation stones beneath her pedestal have shifted with time and neglect, and she tilts now at an angle that would be comical if it weren’t so tragic. The very earth beneath the temple of justice grows unstable, undermined by the weight of golden influence and the erosion of institutional integrity.

What mockery is this,
When those who seek fair judgment
Must first learn the price of scales?

The pigeons that once nested in the courthouse eaves have fled. Even they recognize a structure too corrupted to support life. But Lady Justice remains, her bronze patina green with age and weather, her scales forever tilted by the weight of currency that transforms justice from an ideal into a commodity. The sword in her other hand, once sharp enough to cut through deception, now serves only as a reminder of what authority once meant in a world where truth still mattered.

Around her, the city continues its daily business. Lawyers in expensive suits hurry past without looking up, their briefcases heavy with precedents that can be bought, statutes that can be bent, and laws that bend like reeds in the wind of financial pressure. The common people avoid this place now, knowing instinctively that the marble steps leading to those doors might as well be paved with gold—beautiful to behold, but impossible to climb without the proper currency.

Here ends the dream of equal treatment,
Here begins the auction of our souls.
The highest bidder writes the law,
While justice weeps behind her blindfold,
Her tears falling like rain on barren ground.

The sun sets behind the crumbling courthouse, casting long shadows across the square where Lady Justice keeps her endless vigil. Tomorrow will bring new cases, new bribes disguised as legal fees, new perversions of the ancient promise that all are equal before the law. But tonight, in the dying light, she seems almost human in her sorrow—a goddess abandoned by her worshippers, left to preside over the ruins of the very ideals she was carved to represent.

And still, impossibly, she holds her scales aloft, as if some part of the collective human soul still believes that balance might one day be restored, that the weight of truth might someday outweigh the gravity of gold.