Break the walls

The outdoors
with its careless wings and scavenging feet
invades through the brick and wood
and breathing spaces of my July home.

Hidden passageways open their secret doors:
grasses, crumbs, and damp dark spaces compel
the frontier crossers, oblivious
to my imagined boundaries.

Sheep come through the rail fence
spiders decorate the ceiling corners
ants and earwigs by the dozens
trace pathways for their friends.

And the tiny winged ones occupy the air,
living their short lives until they fall
to the sill, casting long shadows
across the polished wood where I sweep them up.

A saviour, I scoop the insects
out and out and out. My kitchen cloths lie strewn
across the deck while small, unwilling tourists
ponder their new landscape.

___________________________

4 thoughts on “Break the walls

  1. hey ellen this is alovely meditation on what i think of as “disolving boundaries” chickasaw poet linda hogan writes about that too – so happy to read this poem – good to know big ideas like this are circulating …

    Like

    1. Thanks, William, I appreciate your comments; and I didn’t know about Linda Hogan so I am glad of the introduction to her work too.

      Like

I'd love to hear what you think!

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.