Listen, neighbor! For my neighbor you are

Wherever in this so small world you dwell

And especially you listen, Mr. Frost

Your whisp’ring caves so close to my bound’ry

I am doing my best to hibernate

Yet I hear your glitt’ring breath on the air

Bidding welcome to knock under your wreath

And to partake in the wealth of your winter feast

Your loud invitation is rejected!

I much prefer the silence of my home

And chasing mirage buffets in my dreams…

Hear my words again lest they falter’d first:

Silence, neighbor! I am hibernating.

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 neighbour 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 neighbours.”

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

“Why do they make good neighbours? 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 neighbours.”

 

As per usual, I have taken from multiple prompts/challenges/suggestions in creating this post. This time more of them than per usual. The Sunday Writing Prompt at Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie is to write a rant, a tantrum… Meanwhile, the Just Jot it January prompt for today is ‘silence’. Both dVerse Poets Pub and Imaginary Garden with Real Toads are calling for ‘response poems’ which speak to other poems. Sammi Cox’s Weekend Writing Prompt includes the photo I’ve featured here as well as the word ‘boundary’. And finally (finally) the 12 words for Sunday’s Whirligig coming from “In the Cold Country” by Barbara Howes are: “glittering, welcome, wreath, frost, whispering, hibernate, caves, rejected, breath, mirage, under, and falter.”

…All of which culminates in me telling you to shush it. Haha! Whatever you do, don’t take me at my word. Repeat: Do not shush it.  Keep the words coming. I am, in point of fact, not hibernating. Quite to the contrary, I am wide awake and knocking at your door.