ON THE MEANING OF WALLS
for David Rosen
The Great Wall of China couldn’t hold back
every invader, or angle of attack:
the forces of the Mongol khaganate
galloped around it; others used the gate.
Antonine’s Wall wouldn’t hold, Romans knew.
Hadrian’s would—till the legions withdrew.
Constantinople’s Theodosian Walls
stopped everything, till Mehmet’s cannonballs
fell on them, smashing them to smithereens—
call it “diplomacy by other means.”
Jerusalem’s “Western Wall” gained renown
for standing; Berlin’s Wall, for coming down.
From Babylon to blitzkrieged Maginot,
walls came to mean things their makers couldn’t know.
Walls signaled virtue, or the gravest wrong;
a pointing toward who did (or didn’t) belong.
They could be power, pragmatism, art;
everything holding us together, apart.
Regardless of what they were fashioned for,
time would reduce each wall to metaphor.
—from Rattle #86, Winter 2024
__________
Steven Monte: “This poem came to me as a wall—a line of separated rhyming couplets. That’s often the way it is for me: content suggests a form to me, and then the form influences the content in turn. Starting with the idea of ‘The Wall of China’ and Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall,’ along with the notion of separated rhyming couplets, the poem wrote itself, as strange as that may sound. The stricter the form, the quicker the result—assuming that there is a result. It happens or it doesn’t happen.”
