POEMS/ Building Walls
The wall between Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Mexico.
Building Walls
“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 offense.”
—Robert Frost, Mending Wall
Perhaps the poet knew
that other walls would come
in later times
requiring more than elves
to knock them down
built at enormous cost of lives
and resources, they isolate us,
divide us, rich from poor, black from white,
German from German, Arab from Jew
Mexican from US citizen
friends from friends
families from families—
built, their makers say, to keep us safe
these walls do the just the opposite—
wooden, rock, cement, iron, barbed wire,
stretching for miles between us,
cancers on the landscape
all of us on either side
while they still stand—
their prisoners
From All Roads Go Where They Will (Antrim House, 2010)
“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 offense.”
—Robert Frost, Mending Wall
Perhaps the poet knew
that other walls would come
in later times
requiring more than elves
to knock them down
built at enormous cost of lives
and resources, they isolate us,
divide us, rich from poor, black from white,
German from German, Arab from Jew
Mexican from US citizen
friends from friends
families from families—
built, their makers say, to keep us safe
these walls do the just the opposite—
wooden, rock, cement, iron, barbed wire,
stretching for miles between us,
cancers on the landscape
all of us on either side
while they still stand—
their prisoners
From All Roads Go Where They Will (Antrim House, 2010)
