Fence Digging

Richard Crashaw and Robert Frost shaking hands

Fifteen holes for a fence
At ten feet spread for every head.
The ground was stiff and tense,
But we were fresh, and so I said,
"Two days of work, or three, I think,
We'll end before the moon can wink."

So we began to dig
With digging irons, spades, and lines,
No simple drilling rig,
Just hands to harrow holes and mines,
Finding roots and worms—a bone!—
And other secrets long unknown.

But worst of all—the rocks,
Rolled by hand in the planet’s birth,
We pried them out in flocks,
Spearfishing in the ocean earth
With heavy weapons like the beam
Goliath bore (or so it seemed).

I mused to dad if he
Had ever thought how long they laid,
These stones that we would see,
If ever man had made this raid
And held them as we held them here,
These creatures of a deeper sphere.

And thinking on the end
When all are raised on Judgment Day,
Their purpose to defend—
Would they be raised in such a way?
And would they say, "They held us here,
Though we were from a deeper sphere"?

At length we put them back,
And stacked them in to brace each post.
The ground was freshly packed
And we were tense, our muscles most.
Good fences make good blistered hands
And many thoughts the earth demands.

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This poem features a stanza and metrical structure found in a Richard Crashaw poem, “The Weeper.” I had been recently thinking about how a poem written in a “reverse ballad” stanza would read, where the lines were of lengths 3-4-3-4 rather than 4-3-4-3. This poem contains some of this, though rounding out with a couplet for each stanza.

The poem was written a day after completing a fence with the help of my dad. Many thanks to Narcisse Tardif and Donald Paul Owens II for giving me feedback and assisting with a few of the phrases.

As always, you can find this poem on my primary blog, to which you can subscribe to receive all my publications.

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Thanks for reading!