Mest lästa ▸
Elizabeth Madox Roberts
His bridle hung around the post.
The sun and the leaves made spots come down;
I looked close at him through the fence;
The post was drab and he was brown.
His nose was long and hard and still,
And on his lip were specks like chalk.
But once he opened up his eyes,
And he began to talk.
He didn't talk out with his mouth;
He didn't talk with words or noise.
The talk was there along his nose;
It seemed and then it was.
He said the day was hot and slow,
And he said he didn't like the flies;
They made him have to shake his skin,
And they got drowned in his eyes.
war and the state
begin with a fence
proceed to condemn
a man unheard
we fell from one word
such as trouble or shame
bring an aster to trial
and have a rose bled
Putting a garden in so often entails putting wildlife out. You develop an adversarial relationship with nature, fencing, trapping, shooting, poisoning, getting a guard dog… It’s this sad reality that many years ago turned me against what had been the reigning passion of my youth.
onion bed
pulling out
wild onions
water standing
in a raccoon footprint
from here
Plummer’s Hollow Run
deer fence
a sudden understory
of shrubs and forbs
protected from deer
for nearly two decades now
this plot thickens
Smilax
they say her thorniness drove a man
wildflowery
A rabbit has squeezed
into a ring of fencing
to browse on dogwood sprouts
and can’t get out.
The snow crunches under
my boots as I loom up,
the small animal
beating against its cage
like a panicked heart.
Denial
to mitigate the
affirmations
A discarded
fence post
sun beaten
Rejected
of earth
piss ants
Nest in
its shattered
bowels
A spider
has stitched
an erratic
Web of denial
cold night
the pale glow of headstones
behind the fence
not much more
red and yellow tomatoes
behind a string fence
on both sides
of the old wood fence
flooded field
hazy summer morning
the slow walk of the cow
along the fence
New Year’s Day
along the barbed fence
two white-tailed deer.
Along the jail fence
starlings hang on razor wire
stare at us.