Memorial Day Poem by Robert Frost. This is inspired by Liora Leah's Blog called Yard Notes: Trees and Fences

Date:   5/31/2005 7:06:40 AM ( 19 y ago)

http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=309&i=8

When I was in College
at Cal State Northridge back in '71,
I had a profound experience
that shaped me.

I wrote up this story for one of my forthcoming
Plant Your Dream Books.

To share a part of that story,
I lived a block from the School.
NO One spoke. We did not live as neighbors.
I did not know a single
person at the complex.
I wonder how natural a human condition
this was.

Most of us were College Students.

At 6:00 AM the condition had not changed
on one morning in February of that year.
Att 6:01 AM, The San Fernando Valley Earthquake of
1971 happened.
By 6:02 AM there were women and men in
pajamas and nightgowns all standing in the center
of the street like bedpartners.
Everyone had something to say.
We were suddenly quite intimate with each other.

The earthquake was a mystical event in my life.
I had a job working for the San Fernando Valley Sun Newspaper.
The two weeks of the Earth quake, the editor went into
the hospital for an achilles surgery.
I was promoted and became editor of the two issues
of the paper when the Earthquake hit.

There were fallen walls all over the city,
and amazingly as the falls came falling down
the walls between people
came down too.
A more natural condition between people
seemed to be restored.

I believe that community between people is natural.
I believe that finding Ways to understand each other
is essential if we will ever live in a peaceful world
between men and women, and nation and nation.
I believe that the purpose behind intimacy
is to draw two people together so they have an opportunity
to work things out for their own growth
and for the benefit of human and natural evolution.

I printed portions of this poem
on the front page of that newspaper
next to photos of fallen walls.

So where does personal growth begin?
I imagine it starts in our own "Backyard."
It starts when for our own good we find the
courage to say and do the things that keep us
apart, that keep us apart Greater
Human Understanding that can restore Love
as a way of being.

I want to commend Liora Leah for looking deeply
at this issue.

Here is the Poem by Robert Frost--
I send it your way this Memorial Day
when we suffer the consequences of bulding
too many walls between people and nations.

___

Mending Wall
by Robert Frost

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 out-door 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 offence.
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."

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html

 

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