Bricks of the wall,
so much older than the house —
taken I think from a farm pulled down
when the street was built -—
narrow bricks of another century.
Modestly, though laid with panels and parapets,
a wall behind the flowers –
roses and hollyhocks, the silver
pods of lupine, sweet-tasting
phlox, gray
lavender —
unnoticed —
but I discovered
the colors in the wall that woke
when spray from the hose
played on its pocks and warts –
a hazy red, a
grain gold, a mauve
of small shadows, sprung
from the quiet dry brown —
archetype
of the world always a step
beyond the world, that can’t
be looked for, only
as the eye wanders,
found.
April is National Poetry Month and every day the peaceCENTER will be posting a poem about walls, fences, edges, borders. . . you get the idea. Walls that separate us, protect us, define us, challenge us . . . we collected these poems for our Walls Symposium in 2009.
Denise Levertov (1923 – 1997) was a British-born American poet.
