Tug Dumbly - Mending Trump's Wall

  Mending Trump’s Wall

  (Sorry Robert Frost)

  Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

  that makes human indignation swell under it

  and topple razor towers laced with guns

  and makes gaps even caravans can pass abreast.

  The work of peasant families another thing:

  the feds come after them and scream agog,

  where they have left not one mile unbreached,

  where Speedy Gonzales has skittered into hiding

  to tease the yelping dogs.

                                          These gaps, I mean

  no one sees them made, or hears them made

  but every border patrol still finds them.

  My bully Yankee neighbour threatens me

  and on a day he makes us walk the line

  to fix the wall between us once again.

  The means of entry obvious to each -

  tunnels, trampolines, sticks and catapults.

  I say ‘you’d need a spell to keep them out,

  they’ll just stay hid until your back is turned.’

  But my neighbour’s vote is firm in stopping them.

  To be a bubblegum hardman all he’s learned.

  Oh, it’s just another kind of power game,

  ‘Border Security Pantomime’, little more.

  There, where it is, we do not need the wall:

  his people demand cheap oily labour,

  the kind my people fill, and his spurn.

  They won’t steal your apple pies, I tell him.

  He only says, ‘good fences make good neighbours.’

  This man makes mischief in me, and I wonder

  If I could put a notion in his boiled head:

  ‘Make good neighbours? You mean like the

  Berlin Wall, West Bank Wall, Hadrian’s Wall

  and all those other great wall failures 

  of the human imagination?

  Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

  what I was walling in or walling out,

  and to whom I was like to give offence.

  Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

  that wants it down.’

  Oh, I could agree with him it’s 'criminal cartels'.

  But really, his only threat’s internal,

  and I'd rather he saw it for himself. 
  He won’t, of course.

  I see him there, a phone in each hand, madly 
  tweeting, like a stoneage sheriff.

  He moves in darkness, it seems to me,

  with a cruel ignorance of his own inhumanity.

  But he cannot go beyond this media byte

  and he likes having tweeted it so well

  he tweets again, ‘Good fences. And fuck the neighbours.’