Amy Gordon
Wall
Oh, you can never bring in a wall, what say you, Bottom?
—William Shakespeare
In the halls
There are walls
Where portraits hang
In the walls
There are ears
That hear the gone-wrong
Songs of Senators
Something about a wall
Keeping in keeping out
Keeping out keeping in
A lumpy wall
A humpty-dumpty wall
A yo-no-hablo-espanol-ish wall
A stone wall
A stoned wall
A wall for stoning
A wall gone a-wol
A weeping, wailing wall
Keeping in
Keeping out
Let’s build a wall
It’s a well-known fact
No one can waltz over a wall
No one can fox trot over a wall
No one can hip hop over a wall
A wall is to be clambered over
Watch out
You’ll be shot
At the top
Which is the wall
I wonder
Safest to scale
The one in the garden
The one in the meadow
The one in the desert
Which wall is older
The one with the boulders
Or the one made of glass
Well, the ceilings are glass
So why not the walls?
We can shatter them all
Amy Gordon is the author of numerous books for children and young adults, including When JFK Was My Father (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and Painting the Rainbow (Holiday House, 2014). Her poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Aurorean, Plum, and the anthology Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books, 2018).
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