Yarrow House

Drawing Lines

We all live in the borderlands these days, 
our eyes on a world of spreading battlefields,
borders drawn and redrawn, leaders shuffled
by attrition and vote, the struggle 

for power spilling into our houses, our hearts.
Uneasy peace, covert wars. Lines drawn 
in gods and skin color, or the shading of a name.
The battles echo and re-echo our daily struggle

to blend the sides into a whole—
mind over matter, man against nature—spirit 
and body cohabiting uneasily and dodging mines 

in the borderland between the self we want to be 
and the self we perpetually are. The self we try to become
and the self we fall back into, time after time, fall away into.
				

Published in Borderlands, Court Street Press, Seattle: 1999

Onetime reproduction for non-resale purposes permitted by the author with the following credit line:  by Judith Yarrow