Poems Of The Week

[jazzy_dave]

Breaking free from the walls that bind us - two more poems -

The Walls

BY RAY GONZALEZ

Julius Caesar’s head was cut off
and fed to the barbarians waiting
outside the walls of Rome.
Salvador Dali wore one orange
sock and a white one on days
he went to eat breakfast in cafes.
On days he stared at the wall,
he did not wear socks.

Yukio Mishima sheathed his knives
in wall of whale oil, claiming such
creatures were the only ones that
understood the art of sacrifice.
The last thing John Lennon saw
before he was gunned down was
the brick wall of his apartment house.

Sitting Bull had fourteen wives
he lined up against the cliff walls.
He would close his eyes and walk
blindly to them with an erection,
promising he would take the first
one his erection touched.
Crazy Horse watched silently
from the cliff walls above.

J. D. Salinger scribbled on his bedroom
walls as a boy, promising his mother
to whitewash the figures the first
time he was caught.
Joan of Arc climbed over the walls
and fell on top of a castle guard,
the commotion bringing soldiers
who swore the wall opened and
she escaped by stepping through.


Mending Wall

BY ROBERT FROST

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? 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 neighbours."