Being Fences

A fence across the dunes.
Seagrass on one side. Seagrass on the other.
A strange kind of fence,
less to keep one side from the other,
than to capture the sand
and save the tender shoots from storms.
a savior in wire and wood
that takes the winds wrath, year after year.

It becomes picturesque, the fence.
A winding contrast across the sun and sand,
a direction keeper, warning the tourist out for a stroll
that there are better ways to walk than here
where the tender shoots lie.

About this poem

I am thinking about the tender people in our lives. The broken. The lost. There are more of them around us than most of us realize because the broken often become proficient at acting normal. I remember so graphically my own time among them. And I remember the people who were gentle with me, judgement tossed aside in the name of healing. They saved me, those people. They save me to this day. They mold me. They have made me want to be, work at, being just that sort of person, or as the poem says, fence.

The picture was taken at Cape Cod, yesterday.

Tom