‘I picked up the phone and mended a fence’
My cousin said to me
I found it an eloquent sentence
The restoring of harmony
A while since he’d talked to his brother
Some argument had come in between
But now he picked up the phone
And brothers are brothers again
Many fences are broken in this world
And left unattended to rot
That’s how cattle stray
And drift far away
Simply because we forgot
Or refuse to bury the hatchet
What’s broken is your fault not mine
And so we perpetuate grievance
And the world goes to hell every time
The wood we use to make fences
They took and fashioned a cross
And the Lord they then fastened to it
The sign of this world and its loss
But the sign of the cross is our fortune
This suffering redeemed us from sin
Take up the cross every morning
And follow the Lord follow him
Brian Fahy
8 December 2022
+ A cousin of mine, a retired lawyer in Wisconsin, wrote me the line about ‘mending a fence’ and it stuck with me. The world is full of broken fences but we can mend some.
Erris Poetry 