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| Prairie Barbed Wire Fence |
Easter
Sunday
2013
Metaphor
A prose poem for my father James M. Hart
James Hart
If I hear someone say "he was always there for me," I think the speaker sees Christ on His splintered cross, a man suspended, inanimate, a helpless paradox, patience personified, a fence post for the mind. I remember my father, see him cutting hedgerows down to human size, shaping fence posts, setting them into earth like the butts of crosses, so much weight to bear, sighting their clean straight lines. The fences he built over forty years ago have never sagged or slumped like aging men, posts straight as crosses bearing barbed wire, some crowned in thorns, wild rose and creeping briar, thrushes’ nests, twisted brambles cupping speckled eggs, living blood beating inside such fragile shells. And if I think of words as wire and work to fence the stretching years, I see my father hard as hedge, a corner post always there for me, a wiry nest of silver hair cupping his spotted skull like a wondrous egg waiting to fledge a soul.
(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)
A prose poem for my father James M. Hart
James Hart
If I hear someone say "he was always there for me," I think the speaker sees Christ on His splintered cross, a man suspended, inanimate, a helpless paradox, patience personified, a fence post for the mind. I remember my father, see him cutting hedgerows down to human size, shaping fence posts, setting them into earth like the butts of crosses, so much weight to bear, sighting their clean straight lines. The fences he built over forty years ago have never sagged or slumped like aging men, posts straight as crosses bearing barbed wire, some crowned in thorns, wild rose and creeping briar, thrushes’ nests, twisted brambles cupping speckled eggs, living blood beating inside such fragile shells. And if I think of words as wire and work to fence the stretching years, I see my father hard as hedge, a corner post always there for me, a wiry nest of silver hair cupping his spotted skull like a wondrous egg waiting to fledge a soul.
(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)
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