After Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”
These monarch butterflies don’t love a wall.
For centuries, they’d find their refuge here
along the Rio Grande’s quiet banks
just south of Mission, Texas. Every year,
I’d stand outside and watch the spectacle,
the miraculous return of swathes of gold
filling the vast infinity of sky
with a fluttering of wings, my heart
with a fluttering of faith in fate,
in metamorphosis, in love’s migration.
But now, they want to wall this flyway off,
bulldoze the brush, and crush the milkweed
underneath the treads. This wall will tower
higher than a monarch’s wings can fly,
loom over everything, and be the death
of so much more than swarms of butterflies.
Something there is that doesn’t love these walls,
but, in fear, we build them anyway.
READ MORE
‘Death sentence’: Butterfly sanctuary to be bulldozed for Trump’s border wall [The Guardian]
Government shuts down ahead of holiday over stalemate on border wall funding [NPR]
Katherine Hoerth is from the Rio Grande Valley in Deep South Texas. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from UT Rio Grande Valley and currently is an Assistant Professor of English at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.
