Walking past city gardens locked within their fences,
I see my old friends—plants and buildings who once
reached out to me, now safe from those who would
defile them. Soaring spaces dreamed by architects,
living landscapes designed to bring our desert closer—
their arms outstretched through cold steel bars as if
clutching at the sky—now held like convicts in the
prisons of our failed imagination.
—Gene Twaronite
This article appears in May 19-25, 2016.
Sometimes I sit in my backyard and wonder what it would sound like to have every fence and goddamned concrete block wall and lame subdivison gate come crashing down all at once.
What if we all let in the desert? Right up to our doors?
You would be bitten by something, but go ahead and give it a try.
Kate, are you locked up in a mental hospital and hate walls?
With no fences, gates or walls, you would be eaten by wild dogs or murdered by wild criminals.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Mending Walls
Robert Frost
Eaten by wild dogs? Murdered by wild criminals? Do you live in the movie Mad Max?