Revisionist Poetry – Fenced in by a lack of Colour, v.2

Beyond the slats the light has gone to grey:
a sky that learned to forget its blues,
meadows washed down to the pale of bone.
Between the posts, a child’s kite drifts—
a rag of yellow caught and made a flag
of absence; the wind mends nothing.

The fence breathes in old paint, in iron salt,
tongues of rust tasting at the air.
It keeps the mansion of daylight out,
barns of memory, a dog that stops mid-bark.
You press your palm to a splintered plank
and count the rings like prison cells.

Not only wood or wire or stone—
it is the way the world leans small,
how horizons fold into the narrow.
Fear lives in the spaces between slats;
longing pushes fingers through the gaps.
We fold our eyes to the lines we’re shown,

reading borders like weather reports—
clouded verdicts, neat maps of blame.
Fences are not only what is built:
they are the grey the heart accepts,
the single thread of colour we clutch—
a borrowed ribbon, a stubborn bloom—

and in its stubbornness the answer:
to unbind the little hand that ties it,
to let the kite remember how to fall
and how, in falling, lights the sky again.