Poetry: Taking Down Fences – New York Almanack

Taking Down Fences

Cutting each wire I painstakingly twisted
into artful steel nooses,
working past each stubborn staple I hammered
into the unyielding locust,
it dawns on me that times change
as do our needs for constraint.

Decades ago it was an attempt
to keep it all in.
Contained.
Out of the way
of perceived dangers.
It was academic.

Now we’re taking down fences. Considering futures that don’t include us
while halting a legacy
of rusted entanglements.
Changing our notions of constraint.

Revising our conceptions of containment
and revisiting through the aching eyes of nostalgia
the naivete of our past efforts at husbandry.

Photo by K. Gordon Tidball.