Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Friday, March 13, 2020

“Keep Patience ever at your side:
you’ll need it for a constant guide.”

Catherine McAuley [1778–1841] founded the Sisters of Mercy in 1831 during an early moment in Ireland’s version of the enclosure movements (i.e. forcing very poor Irish women and men off their small subsistence farms to open the land they had lived on to large pastures for sheep).   Sheep held the key to immense wealth once the invention of power spinning and weaving began to replace hand work;  British textiles became a global empire.   Forcing subsistence farmers off their farms created the slums in Irish and English cities.

This was the world Catherine McAuley learned to treat as home for the Sisters of Mercy and home for brutally poor Irish women and their children.  Many of the early Sisters died of virulent respiratory infections.

I chose to shine a light on the character and poetry of Catherine McAuley on this day in particular, as people in our city and country and world learn to live with “an abundance of caution” in the face of the Covid 19’s exponential spread within this country and around many parts of the world.  As you read the poem, it helps to recall the context of the 19^th century pandemic in which she wrote and spoke.

Catherine, the founder and leader and inspiration of these women, frequently kept vigil with many of them as they died.  She became famous for her tenderness and her courage, but also for the playful wit with which she wrote and spoke.

Have a blest weekend,

John Staudenmaier, SJ

Today’s Post – Letter from M. Catherine McAuley to M. Elizabeth Moore, early December 1838

Don’t let crosses vex or tease;
try to meet all with peace and ease.
Notice the faults of every day –
but often in a playful way.
And when you seriously complain,
let it be known to give you pain.
Attend one thing at a time:
you’ve fifteen hours from 6 to 9.
Be mild and sweet in all your ways;
now and again bestow some praise.
Avoid all solemn declaration,
all serious, close investigation.
Turn what you can into a jest,
and with few words dismiss the rest.
Keep Patience ever at your side:
you’ll need it for a constant guide.
Show fond affection every day,
and above all, devoutly pray
that God may bless the charge He’s given,
and make of you their guide to Heaven.

Catherine McAuley
Artist: Marie Henderson, RSM

“Rhymes taken from Letters of Catherine McAuley,” in The Correspondence of Catherine McAuley 1827-1841

ps.  Remembering a companion who has left us.

Sally Baker
January 15, 1942 – March 13, 2019

Wednesday March 11
“Our dreams drink coffee with us”

Sometimes I get so busy that being behind on tasks distracts me from beauty.  That’s a shame.  Such a week this is proving to be.  One of the Jesuits I live with saw his first robin 3 days ago.  The snow plow piles have melted.  Daylight saving time means the sun will set c 7:34.  Yes!!

Still we live with tasks and uncertainties, griefs and wounds.   Today, I found again this Joy Harjo poem, a reminder that the kitchen table serves our needs for food and work and mystical grace.

Blessings on the day.  Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

john sj

Today’s Post  —  “Perhaps the World Ends Here”

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children.

They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

“Perhaps the World Ends Here” from The Woman Who Fell From the Sky by Joy Harjo.
Copyright © 1994 by Joy Harjo. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., www.wwnorton.com

p.s.       A note from March 2015:  “Last night I emailed a friend at the University of Oklahoma, made noteworthy by President Boren’s strong response to frat brothers caught with a video clip of them singing a viciously racist song.  My friend emailed this short, eloquent response to me this morning.  Worth sharing.

“Yes, it has been very stressful all the way around. I approve Pres. Boren’s actions although I can’t help but wonder whether the kids involved (who, despite their protests, really are racist) will ever personally acknowledge it and come to grips with it in a way that could produce change. Of course, all things are possible. And you have to set standards of behavior and make an environment that is safe for all. But so much of facing racism is not about intellectually understanding the reality of broad human equality (although that’s part of it), but about emotionally understanding it. And that kind of emotional understanding gets built through contact and community, something that’s so absent in segregated America.”

p.p.s.  re-editing this post in the midst of the Democratic Michigan Primary Election brings the university student wrestling with racist venom on another university’s 2015 campus vividly into our present world of 2020.

“At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow
We pray with suffering and remorse.
We give thanks.”

Monday, March 9, 2020

“some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.”

One of my soul friends of many years emailed Rumi’s “Guest House” in March of 2017 when, as now in 2020, Spring whispers to me of “Lent” and begins to hint of fresh rebirth in the grass and supple new leaves on our trees.  In the early sun across our courtyard, this ancient change of seasons has become unmistakable even while it remains tentative.

When readers send poems, they create a place of quiet in me and sometimes change my plans for a given day’s post.  So it is this morning.  Rumi’s poem creates a still place alive with realism and laughter, grief and joy.  Best to read the poet’s creation out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest week, the second of this Lent.

john sj

Today’s Post “The Guest House”

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī  (جلال‌الدین محمد رومی‎)
Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic 1207-1273.

March 6, 2020  “generations”

2015 marked the 50th anniversary of Broadside Press.  Those 50 years represent several generations of poets who have shared Dudley Randall’s vision of the written word as a living art form intimately connected to community and to self-determination.

One poet from this up-and-coming generation, Deonte Osayande. is a graduate of Detroit Mercy.  Detroit Mercy’s library, in honor of Dudley Randall’s several decades of work there, has been designated as one of the rare “National Literary Landmarks,”  along with other literary giants including William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Emily Dickenson and Ernest Hemingway.  Deonte Osayande is a graduate of Detroit Mercy. He won awards in Dudley Randall Poetry Competitions and has read his work at numerous Broadside Press-sponsored events.

Osayande’s poetry has appeared in over a dozen publications. He is a powerful performance poet who teaches creative writing to inner city youth with the InsideOut Detroit Literary Arts Project. I am indebted to Professor Rosemary Weatherston, Director, Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture, for introducing me to Mr. Osayande.   You can see Osayande perform “Masks” by clicking on the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieTwvPEtlqs

Daylight saving time on Sunday.

Have a blest weekend,

john sj

Wednesday,  March 4
The boat bobbed into the distance,
shrinking like a toy—
at which point you probably realized
you had always loved the sea.

You could imagine that today’s poet, Naomi Shihab-Nye, had read last month’s post where I tipped my hat and even bowed my head to remember my soul friend Connie di Biase.   About our long shared love, I wrote “Over 4 decades of kinship, Connie de Biase and I partnered in a mutual commitment to noticing.”  Noticing creates a habit of expecting that you live in a world alive with graceful surprises.   They open you to unexpected wonder and unlock hope when grief or fear or just mean crankiness seem to assume the power to lock down your imagination in a prison of dead-ends.

Like today’s poet, Connie loved to tease, or even scold . . . “You are stuck just now, aren’t you?  Missing your own beauty, treating your own self with meanness that you would never inflict on the people of your life.  GET A LIFE!  You are beautiful and beloved just as you are.”

Connie was never so alive with beauty as when she showed you that she noticed your own unique beauty, and she never scolded except when you were missing the boat and getting lost in gloom. When she noticed that, she rose to heights of insight and teasing that could fill your imagination for a lifetime.

No wonder so many people miss her voice.  No wonder, too, “Missing the Boat” catches my attention,  makes me laugh and then apologize for the grace I’d been missing.

Have a blest Wednesday.

john sj

Today’s Post – “Missing the Boat”

by Naomi Shihab-Nye

It is not so much that the boat passed
and you failed to notice it.
It is more like the boat stopping
directly outside your bedroom window,
the captain blowing the signal-horn,
the band playing a rousing march.

The boat shouted, waving bright flags,
its silver hull blinding in the sunlight.

But you had this idea you were going by train.

You kept checking the time-table,
digging for tracks.

And the boat got tired of you,
so tired it pulled up the anchor
and raised the ramp.

The boat bobbed into the distance,
shrinking like a toy—
at which point you probably realized
you had always loved the sea.

Naomi Shihab Nye Different Ways to Pray- Breitenbush Publications, 1980

Naomi Shihab Nye
(b. March 12, 1952)

Connie di Biase
(d. February 10, 2017)

Monday, March 2, 2020

I happened upon Nicholas Kristof’s March 30 column about the importance of art and the humanities.   In the process, he’s written a strong explanation for why the “Work Day in a Hard Time” poetry list exists and appears (mostly) M-W-Fr each week.  “we need the humanities more than ever to counter nationalism and demagoguery.”

At the head of our Archive Blog appears the List’s Mission Statement, written in September 2013 when our city was awash in dire predictions of Detroit’s impending collapse and the US Congress awash in venomous partisan divides.  A tough time too on our Detroit campuses.  It’s worth repeating here on this early Spring Monday and worth inviting our c. 2700 readers to read The Poetry List’s mission statement again.

Nicholas Kristof MARCH 30, 2017

CreditMark Lennihan/Associated Press

So what if President Trump wants to deport Big Bird?  We’re struggling with terrorism, refugees, addiction, and grizzlies besieging schools. Isn’t it snobbish to fuss over Trump’s plans to eliminate all funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?

Let me argue the reverse: Perhaps Trump’s election is actually a reminder that we need the humanities more than ever to counter nationalism and demagoguery. Civilization is built not just on microchips, but also on arts, ideas and the humanities. And the arts are a bargain: The N.E.A. budget is $148 million a year, or less than 0.004 percent of the federal budget. The per-capita cost for Americans is roughly the cost of a postage stamp.  The humanities may seem squishy and irrelevant. We have a new president who doesn’t read books and who celebrates raw power. It would be easy to interpret Trump as proof of the irrelevance of the humanities.

Yet the humanities are far more powerful than most people believe. The world has been transformed over the last 250 years by what might be called a revolution of empathy driven by the humanities. Previously, almost everyone (except Quakers) accepted slavery and even genocide. Thomas Jefferson justified the “extermination” of Native Americans; whippings continued in American prisons in the 20th century; and at least 15,000 people turned up to watch the last public hanging in the United States, in 1936.  What tamed us was, in part, books. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” famously contributed to the abolitionist movement, and “Black Beauty” helped change the way we treat animals. Steven Pinker of Harvard argues that a surge of literacy and an explosion of reading — novels in particular — “contributed to the humanitarian revolution,” by helping people see other viewpoints. There is also modern experimental evidence that reading literary fiction promotes empathy.

The humanities have even reshaped our diet. In 1971, a few philosophy students, including an Australian named Peter Singer, gathered on a street in Oxford, England, to protest the sale of eggs from hens raised in small cages. This was an unknown issue back then, and passers-by smiled at the students’ idealism but told them they’d never change the food industry.. naïve? Today, keeping hens in small cages is illegal in Britain, in the rest of the European Union and in parts of the United States. McDonald’s, Burger King, General Mills and Walmart are all moving toward exclusively cage-free eggs, because consumers demanded it.  Singer, now a Princeton University professor, is a wisp of a man who defeated an agribusiness army with the power of his ideas and the muscle of the humanities. (Singer has a terrific recent book, “Ethics in the Real World,” that wrestles with how much we should donate to charity, and whether wearing a $10,000 watch is a sign of good taste, or of shallow narcissism.)

In short, the humanities encourage us to reflect on what is important, to set priorities. For example, do we get more value as taxpayers from Big Bird and art or music programs, or from the roughly $30 million Trump’s trips to his Mar-a-Lago golf resort will cost us when he’s tallied nine visits in office (he’s already more than halfway there)? That’s also more than the cost of salaries and expenses to run the National Endowment for the Humanities, not including the grants it hands out.   Do we get more value from billions of dollars spent on deportations? Or from tiny sums to support art therapy for wounded veterans?   Then there’s our favorite bird. The Onion humor website reported: “Gaunt, Hollow-Eyed Big Bird Enters Sixth Day Of Hunger Strike Against Proposed Trump Budget.” In fact, Big Bird will survive, but some local public television stations will close without federal support — meaning that children in some parts of the country may not be able to see “Sesame Street” on their local channel.

In 2017, with the world a mess, I’d say we need not only drones but also Big Bird, and poetry and philosophy. Indeed, our new defense secretary, Jim Mattis, apparently shares that view: He carried Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” to Iraq with him.  It’d be nice to see Mattis drop off “Meditations” for the new commander in chief. And maybe present the first lady a copy of “Lysistrata.”   Look, I know it sounds elitist to hail the humanities. But I’ve seen people die for ideas. At Tiananmen Square in China in 1989, I watched protesters sacrifice their lives for democracy. In Congo, I saw a tiny Polish nun stand up to a warlord because of her faith and values.

The humanities do not immunize a society from cruelty and overreaction; early-20th-century Germany proves that. But on balance, the arts humanize us and promote empathy. We need that now more than ever.  Jamaal May’s contemplation of our city brings a strong poem to bear on what Nicholas Kristof writes in the form of a wise essay.

Today’s Post:   “There are birds here”   By Jamaal May

For Detroit
There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.
The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,
I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone.
I am trying to say
his neighborhood
is as tattered and feathered
as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in that birdless city.

Jamaal May, “There Are Birds Here” from The Big Book of Exit Strategies.
Copyright © 2016 by Jamaal May. Reprinted by permission of Alice James Books.

Thursday, was the feast of the Episcopalian saint, George Herbert.   His prayer-poem “Love bade me welcome” has become my most consistent beginning of morning contemplation.  Its status in my morning prayer originated with Marion Sweetser in Minneapolis on a late summer  day in 1965; she was the mother of Tom Sweetser, a close Jesuit friend, then and now.   I and 3 other young Jesuits were driving through Minnesota and most of South Dakota, on our way to a year’s teaching at what was then known as “Holy Rosary Mission” (a K-12 boarding school on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation).  I was coming back from my first teaching ever.  That first year had worn me down;  veteran teachers there told me in February or March that this was the toughest year they could remember.   We lost 33% of the high school girls and boys that year and of the 5 young Jesuits who began the year, 2 left the Jesuits and the school, over Christmas break.   By that year’s end, my colitis made me  resemble a gaunt and haggard refugee.

What I remember that day, when Marion cooked lunch for us, was her intuitive gift for noticing what was going on in each us. She recognized that I was a generous young man, who had a hard time letting people welcome me.  She welcomed me, that day and for the next quarter century.  I stopped at her home as often as I could, sometimes just for a meal, more often for 3 or 4 days when only the two of us were there.  Her husband had died some years before and her many children (seven I think) filled her life. I learned how to be at home in her kitchen where we would talk and talk over the years.

George Herbert’s poem reminds me of her, especially the lines beginning:
“But quick-eye’d love, observing me grow slack from my first entrance in, drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lacked anything.”

Today, all these years later, I honor the poet and Marion for the gift of welcoming people as sacred whether I am in a playful or a hard place.

Best to read the poem out loud,  with pauses.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert
1593-1633
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert

Wednesday, February 26:
weather.com  31°  –
wind from the north,  currently 9 mph and building to 15 mph by midnight
advice:  “bundle up”

Today is Ash Wednesday in the Christian tradition, the beginning of “Lent.”  The word suggests that people living in our northern latitude chose this Anglo-Saxon word (in Anglo-Saxon Lent means “Spring”).  In the climate where our city and university live, Lent is a long season during which what at first appears to be dead, very gradually surprises us with vital life.   Ash Wednesday challenges us northerners, telling us that growing things — shrubs, trees, grass — look like they are dead when the 40 days begin.   It takes a long time, with patient attention, until they prove to us that they’ve been alive after all.   So too do Lent prayers challenges us to imagine that when we feel dead, we are really alive.

For a Lenten prayer, some people choose a twig and stop very near the twig somewhere along their ordinary path, keeping vigil week after week, letting the twig surprise them in slow motion.

Best to read the poem out loud with pauses.

Have a blessed Lent.

john sj

university chapel roof after a winter storm – January 12, 2011

Today’s post:  Linda Paston “Wind Chill”

The door of winter
is frozen shut,

and like the bodies
of long extinct animals, cars

lie abandoned wherever
the cold road has taken them.

How ceremonious snow is,
with what quiet severity

it turns even death to a formal
arrangement.

Alone at my window, I listen
to the wind,

to the small leaves clicking
in their coffins of ice.

ps. Easter, this year, falls on April 12.

new life is coming
a meadow in Rocky Mountain National Park in July

Linda Pastan
1932-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Pastan

Monday, February 24
The Lakota expression “hanblechia” means
“she/he cries out for a vision.”

“Hanblechia,”  the most sacred Lakota ritual, begins with a sweat bath, singing and begging prayers as the bodies of the people in the sweat lodge are welcomed into supersaturated steam from igneous rocks, which won’t explode when they have been fire heated to deep red.  The people in the dark lodge break a sweat before the singer pours the first dipper of water on the glowing rocks; they are piled in the center hole inches away from those who have entered the sweat lodge.  The lodge is covered tightly so that the inside is completely dark, except for the glowing rocks.  The lodge has the shape of a half circle, the singer does not pour the first water until the door flap is closed and the people all sit cross-legged and naked.  In that posture, the roof of the lodge is only a few inches from the top of your head and you have bent forward,  close to the red hot stones,  a few inches from your face.  When the sweat is finished the sweat, the holy man (“Wicasa Wakan”) leads the seeker to a sacred place to pray alone, for as many as 4 days of complete fasting, begging for a vision to live from.

Jim Janda lived as a mystic pilgrim for most of his 74 years. He died August 7, 2010 in Salt Lake City, a priest of that diocese since 1996. Jim also lived for a quarter century as a Jesuit which is when we met. Jim was “well known for his gentle and generous heart. . . . During his life he wrote and published a series of short religious stories for children, school plays and books of poetry.” So reads his obituary in the Salt Lake Tribune. The obit is accurate, as was the stated cause of his death, emphysema; I think he smoked too much. I can’t remember ever visiting with Jim without feeling bathed in wisdom and tenderness, and in his awareness of how deep grief runs in human beings, right there along with whimsy.

The Tribune’s evocation of “stories for children, school plays and books of poetry . . .” does not even hint at the flint-hard prose and fine-tuned ironies that throb and flow through his poems. Today’s post comes from the 1970s when Jim lived on the Lakota Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Like many of his poems, “The Town in March” is homey and close to the grass without flinching from pain.

Jim Janda reminds me of Joy Harjo. I am glad I thought to pull his book off my poetry shelf.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest weekend,

john sj

Today’s Post 

To cry for a
vision
is a sacred
task

after hearing
a holyman
after taking
a sweat bath
with sage and
sweet grass

one must climb a
mountain alone—

here a song
may be heard
here a vision
may be given
here a dance
may be learned—

one must then
leave
the mountain

to sing the
song
to live the
vision
to begin the
dance

J Janda

Jim Janda   d. August, 2010

Friday,  February 21, 2020
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out”

It’s hard to live through a full day without hearing angry calls for walls to keep out unwanted migrant people, women and men, infants and children.  Walls with their locks and keys can privilege fear over welcome.  Robert Frost’s masterpiece, “Mending Wall,” treats his neighbors’ suspicions playfully.

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?”

Here on campus,  in late February 2016, we dedicated a new gate onto McNichols Road.  Does the gate say welcome or suspicion?   For many centuries, keys and locks stood as one of the most ambiguous of technologies.  Locks and their keys are more or less everywhere you look;   car doors, house and garage doors, credit card codes, traffic scanners.  Whether they welcome or exclude depends on who can enter and who cannot.  On our campus I am most proud of two places in our perimeter fence:  one, you do not need a student, faculty, or staff smart card to use our library.  Neighbors can come in and work on 10 or 12 of the 50 work stations to access the internet.  Neighbors can also bring a laptop to use our wireless capacity.  The only exception is the week before finals when all 52 work stations are reserved for students prepping for their exams.  That same open gate policy welcomes neighbors to work out on our track and playing fields except when student teams are practicing or competing.

We had suffered with a stingy-looking gate for years.  The new gate, now in its third year, makes me smile even on hard days.  This morning, I was looking out our living room window and watching Detroit Mercy people arrive for another work day.  The gate makes people who come and go look a little more beautiful, and brave, and noble.

Perhaps that’s why Robert Frost came to mind today.  “Mending Walls” is a great poem, a source of wisdom and playful humor during crabby times.

Best to read the poet out loud, with pauses.  Have a blest day.

john st sj

Today’s Post, “Mending Walls”

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 neighbor 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 outdoor 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 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 offense.
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.’

Robert Frost, 1874 – 1963