Gate

My mother had this poem displayed in her home office for years and I love it so she found it for me and I'm posting it for poetry month.

Gate

There's no track of a hedge,
no trace of a fence.
In the middle of a field
an iron gate and no evidence

of path or passage.
It clings to rusty hinges
on chiselled stone,
it hardly infringes

on the course of stock --
for cattle a pair
of scratching posts,
for the colt and chestnut mare

a nuzzling place where you pause
and again you contemplate
in the middle of open grazing
your fate

by a gate that stops nothing
and points nowhere....
Say for a moment
the field is your

life and you come
to a gate at the centre
of it. What then?
Then you pause. And open it. and enter.

Peter Fallon