Revisionist Poetry – “Where the Fences Learn Our Names” – Fenced in by a lack of Colour, v.4

Beyond the paling posts the daylight bleeds to bone—
a pallid sky that keeps its tongue withdrawn.
Fences stand like sentries in a ruined dream,
their teeth of iron tasting salt and rot.
Moonlight goes thin as linen over fields;
the world beyond is muffled, worn to ash.

These rails remember rain as rust remembers hands,
and paint peels like skin from some long-dead promise.
A yellow ribbon—once bright—hangs slack, a fossil;
its colour leeched into the hollow air.
Crows, ledgering the barbed wire, tally names
no living mouth will ever speak aloud.

Touch the plank: it answers with a cold old grief,
rings counted like bones beneath your palm.
Fences are not mute; they whisper ledgered laws,
a litany of small confinements sealed in mortar.
They learn the cadence of our fear and teach it back—
a hymn that tightens round the throat.

Look: children fold their small rebellions thin as paper,
kites snag and become relics, flags of absence.
Longing becomes a hunted thing, gaunt and patient,
pressing its face to the narrow stead of gap.
We train our eyes to read the world as kept—
to love the margin and fear the open.

So the fence grows not outward but inward;
it builds a chapel of shadow in every chest.
There the heart, in its tidy cell, rehearses exile—
and night, like an archivist, files us under loss.
Listen: sometimes, when the wind is very still,
you will hear it say your name, and let you in no more.