The Fence

a poem

The Fence

We once kept a garden together,
measuring rows by the width of our palms,
planting what we were told would feed us.

We built a fence,
just tall enough
to mark the edges of belief.

For years, it felt like home—
soil beneath our nails,
prayers in our breath,
and the soft rhythm of belonging
as we knelt side by side,
pulling weeds that dared the boundaries.

But one spring,
I noticed color spilling through the slats—
wildflowers, unplanned and uninvited,
growing in the unclaimed earth beyond.

Their names were strange.
Their beauty unsettled.
Their fragrance carried something freer
than the order we’d made of faith.

I stepped closer,
and the ground did not give way.
The sun, it turned out,
shone on both sides of the fence.

Now you call across sometimes,
your voice tight with warning,
as if the air here were thinner,
as if love could not cross wood and wire.

You say I’ve left the garden.
But I still wake early,
hands in the same soil,
tending life wherever it dares to grow.

And when the wind shifts,
I hear your prayers, too—
lifting over the fence,
carrying seeds neither of us planted,
toward a God who was never afraid
of wild things.

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Hear the poem spoken below: