Holding Your Ground

Big Frank presents a poem based on an actual conversation. Afterwards the exchange took on layers upon layers and the dilemma of the real replaced by the fake in order to change reality that is laughed off at the time, but effective nonetheless. The neatness of the outcome is a puzzle that leaves you scratching your head.

Holding Your Ground
By Big Frank Dickinson

Side by side, yard by yard – neighbors but in name;
A year or more the fence between – not one thing more.
And on the ground weeds grew among the rocks,
Til over the fence unwanted weeds were tossed.

“Are those rocks real?”, she asks
abruptly in answer to his question:
“You aren’t throwing those weeds in my yard, are you?”
He tells her that they are; (who has fake rocks?)

Then points to the piles of boulders that lie
Strewn all about, and talks about the quantity
And the function they serve upon the slopes.
“They keep things in place – such as they are.”

Just their heads reach over the fence
Between them – neighbor to neighbor
Talking as never before and all around them lie
Rocks holding the ground down.

He turns trampling the weeds to go inside
and puzzles how a rock could be doubted?
And in her mind the satisfaction of having
Replaced his question with her own.