Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out

Robert Frost, from ” Mending Wall”

Let me know what you think of this reading of the poem: Robert Frost reads the poem to a video of the Berlin Wall

.!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTglCBLomXA

The jacket of Talking Walls Discover Your World shows the inspiration for the book, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. In the fall of 1990,  I listened to poet Doug Rawlings, co-founder Veterans for Peace read his poem, The Wall . As he read I thought about other walls and their stories and turned to my friend Elizabeth and told her that I might have a good idea for a book.

The Wall

Descending into this declivity
dug into our nation’ s capitol
by the cloven hoof
of yet another one of our country’ s
tropical wars

Slipping past the names of those
whose wounds
refuse to heal

Slipping past the panel where
my name would have been
could have been
perhaps should have been

Down to The Wall’ s greatest depth
where the beginning meets the end
I kneel

Staring through my own reflection
beyond the names of those
who died so young

Knowing now that The Wall
has finally found me \endash
58,000 thousand-yard stares
have fixed on me
as if I were their Pole Star
as if I could guide their mute testimony
back into the world
as if I could connect all those dots
in the nighttime sky
As if I
could tell them
the reason why

http://voiceseducation.org/content/doug-rawlings-veterans-peace