Beyond fences

by

Mary A. Green

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Beyond the knoll-perched barn
Where Prince and Queenie stood in stalls
Nuzzling feed-boxes for their oats
And beyond the shanty chicken house
Where drowsy fowl conversed
Tot tot at dusk
As we drew shut their door
Against the night and coyotes

Two lines of barbed wire fence
Stretched tight 'tween weathered posts
With room enough for me
To crawl under to the pasture
Where cattle seldom grazed
Though metamorphic boulders
In prehistoric state
Reclined in black-eyed susanned grasses
Cream and grey and quartz-specked rose

Here the knowing aspen tittered
As I passed
And the killdeer called to me
From a hollow in the pasture
by a stagnant silent slough
Here the playful wind cavorted
Teasing comb-defying tangles in my hair
As it bent the drying grasses
Across backs of sleeping rocks
Sending songs of meadow lark and killdeer
beyond fences into now
So that I can hear them still
In the midst of concrete wasteland
At the ebbing of my life

Here I often picked bouquets of wind-caressed wild flowers In the pasture where the birds sang And the grasses bent o'er rocks As I hurried to the fence Bearing black-eyed susanned nosegays Down the knoll where mother waited
Anxious, scolding

Yet received my proffered treasure
Grasping stems in soapy hand
Wistful almost in a whisper
Did she speak to me
Or a mem'ry from her childhood
Black-eyed susans for brown-eyed Helen
Are the words I hear today