Mending the Great Southern Wall
(With Apologies to Mr. Frost)

Mac Griffith

Something (Democratic) there is that doesn’t love a wall.
Something (Republican) holds dear the Great Southern Wall.
This wall has less of playfulness than Mr. Frost gently lifting his
Apple orchard by its scruff to stop it roughhousing with his neighbor’s
Dark pines. Walls can be malign, benign, or even cute little hovering
Drones. The wall doesn’t know it’s a wall, doesn’t know that even God
Wilts before endless, droning, bad faith palabras about immigration,
Yada; sanctuary, yada, yada; and anchor babies, yada, yada, nada.
The wall stones stand tall against the invading hordes. Always invaders.
Always hordes. Never pairs or tweedy foursomes. “Hordes.”
Were there one invader, or five, perhaps I could clearly see a dawn
Face. One—just one sweating face—glinting, heaving over the wall.

Some walls are beautiful: that high fence at Little League games, so
Aunt Kate, in the bleachers, protected from foul concussion, can rotely
Cheer her nephew, while she re-re-rereads Anna Karenina, a book
About magically invisible Harry Potter walls. Kate pauses (barely)
To lift a cheer when she hears the family stir. Forty years Kate has
Been arguing with Lev Tolstoy (that abundant man), the same as if he
Were alive. Kate hates Lev’s invisible walls that crushed the life out of
Anna for the crime of being foolish, for being only what Lev made her.
This is a favorite trick of the gods, but I don’t know why.
Can’t they just let us happily do things we know how to do,
Rather than setting us problems impossible of ciphering?
Rather than standing up invisible walls to chivy north the gente?
Good walls make good neighbors, but I don’t know when.
And the invisible ones can crush you as surely as an iron locomotive.

Careful, careful of what we are walling in and walling out.
Some folks believe they are walling out traffickers in sex and drugs and
Foul murder and future Democratic voters and non-Swedish people,
People stooping to steal the stoop labor beloved of America Firsters.
Firsters who are right to fear some things palliated by some walls—
Murder, miscellaneous barbarism—all too Medusan to safely see.
Other folks want to embrace the bereft, the abused, the hungry,
The gentle gente, terrified of their own AK-47 neighbors, a fear
Against which there is only flight (or an unfinished scream). We must
Urgently, urgently (and without one clue how) make sure we are
Walling in the righteous and walling out the depraved.

Happily, in the walling in and the walling out,
I will always be on the angelically righteous side of the wall.
Immigrants need to come here, but I will never need to go there.
Not to Mexico or Canada or any other unexceptional place.
No heaving over a wall for me. How could that even be?
And if I did (to go to Cancun?), I would ride my golden escalator.
After study and reflection, I believe that this deal is fair to me.
But God may disagree. God may think “fair” makes both sides serene.
Silly God, unable to grasp notions like sovereignty and private property.
Should we, then, build walls where folks are alike happy on either side?
The aggravating amongst you will ask, then why a wall at all? Because,
Because—I don’t love both sides of the Great Southern Wall.
Something there (also) is that doesn’t love the wrong side of walls.
No two-sided, fair deal, Golden Rule wall for me. Golden Rule?
Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Golden Rule?
A Rule blown air kisses by every religion, but quietly despised by all.
Genuflect to my beliefs, but the other way? Crazy all the day.
Something religious there is that doesn’t love the wrong side of walls.

Me, I have a Great Southern Wall to protect me from foul concussion,
And my neighbor, Mexico, paid for it all and will mend it at my call.