Week XXIV: Babel, Pt. 4 - Coda

Chaos formed in rings and waves
Darkness fell upon the slaves
Confounded voices dispersed their scattered words

Piercing cries from sharpened tongues
Impaled the letters drawn and hung
Shapeless marks in dust and falling tears

The tower and its stone protrusions
Stood firm against the dissolution
A sepulcher concealing remnant echoes

The sound crept through the cracking mortar
Shaking stones and sand immortal
Whispers lost in motes and darkened swirls

The coming night an inkwell black
A mask upon the bending backs
Of words now incomplete, no consolation

As textures writhing on the ground
Chaotic formless broken sound
Unified in loss and failing throats

Translation by the sweeping hand
Of God whose vicious curse of humans
Left creation trembling beneath

In moonless corners, dark slunk in
To sing a new temptation, sin
That it might mask the echo's older tongues

A serpentine curse from deep below
Soon found the cowering, fearful souls
In desperate leaps, they caught it in their mouths

A new refrain in harshest tones
Sang bitter in the trembling stones
Slanted and grotesque as crooked sculpture

The cursing pinched the tongues of many
A garish cry of enmity
A war of sound beheld in tower heights

The droning chant imbuing evil
Contended with residuals
The clamor shaking all the world's foundations

Harmonics fly, pitch and yaw
Reverberate throughout the halls
And all the ashen vessels hearken to them

Listen
The wailing of the rent and torn
Subsides as though a passing storm
The clouds from blackened chorus bringing rain

Dissonance, denying God
Accursed masses, lost facade
Failing mask of self-divinity

Yet deep within, a recognition
That they might of their own volition
Recapture what they once had held as true

The waves of sound within the tower
Cracked the stones as they grew louder
The greatest art began to buck and sway

The savage voice of blackened speech
Contended out of human reach
With all the harmonies left from their praise

And when it reached the tallest spire
The words made flesh could reach no higher
The stones could never touch the face of God

Blackest night gave way to red
Piercing flares and golden threat
Illuminating wasted words and breath

The contest in the tower fading
The vessels there below in waiting
Seeking shreds of hope amidst the ruin

The sun arose to light the day
Rebirth for words of ash and clay
A recollection of their genesis

Their gaze fell eastward to the light
And images of Eden's flight
Came flooding to the minds and hearts of all

The garden which from memory
Became a cage, illusory
Before the words were granted in deceit

The blinding march towards the sun
Seeking eternity, finding none
Babylon constructed there instead

The apple bleeding from their lips
As falling dew from tendrils drips
They sought to taste its nectar once again

For therein God had not foreseen
The essence of creative beings
Their hubris paid in tears and flesh and blood

That many tongues would tell the tale
The fallen tower to regale
With newer words and greater yarns to spin

A phalanx cut in cuneiform
The phoenix in the ash reborn
The words made flesh beheld their tongues anew

Melodious roots brought singing fruit
New generations followed suit
And harmony became the fireweeds

As God destroys, so it creates
The beauty of the language plays
In jest to One who thought to ruin all

In jealousy, divine in thought
The greatest art was culled for naught
For now their palate grew and multiplied

A thousand songs soon burst from one
With common language come undone
The mother tongue passed down onto the child

The poets came to paint their flourish
Downtrodden souls from which to nourish
Discovering their letters yet again

The word was God, begun again
Beginning brought of violent end
The beauty now of many yet as one

For flesh in ash and dust composed
Though fallen in its verse and prose
May seek the new divine from many paths

Behold the words made manifest
The wrong of pride is soon redressed
In humble speech and laughter for their folly

They cast up to eternal scribes
A reverence from deep inside
And fill the book with many new translations

Though memories begin to dim
Of knowledge bought with carnal sin
The fruit brought forth an orchard in its stead

May all who come to recollect
Behold the spire and genuflect
For all was lost, eternity to gain

Week XXIII: Babel, Pt. 3 - The Tower

Behold and admire the ascendant spiral
Its apses refuse elemental decay
The buffeting winds whistle sweet from the spire
A song of delight in hearts of clay

The ritual held in hubristic design
Its sacred geometry traced in the earth
Beset by the glory of untethered minds
Expanding in measures as merits of worth

The scribes of the book of life noted the plans
That records eternal of human misdeeds
Be weighted against all the mortar and sand
Constituent blocks of heretical creeds

They thought not to sacrifice well to the Gods
Assuming the mantle, denying the source
The slaves of the word ignorant of their bonds
Played masters and fools in proverbial farce

The builders united, their language as one
Their tower still climbing, erect in the sky
Its foundation thought to be never undone
Forgetting the dust and the ashes inside

The God in the word and the word in the flesh
The vessel imperfect, its content divine
The great incongruity, ignorant, blessed
Prescribing the tongue and distorting the mind

A gilded processional purchased the gaze
The letters incarnate, the eyes and the wise
As forbears of Sisyphus carried the stones
And bid the apocryphal prophets arise

And all there were gathered to hear of the word
Creation's custodians circled the square
The carrion majesties screamed to be heard
As the sun became black as a sackcloth of hair

The words fell upon them as arrows and darts
Divine retribution confounded their speech
The wheat and the chaff were torn apart
Their dissonant tongues now beyond common reach

The scribes at the veil slowly lifted the cloth
They gazed on the words and the discord they made
Indignant and jealous as God in his wroth
Despised his creations in flesh and in name

Woe to the vessels who mourn for the loss
The tower, the tongue, the letters confused
Consumed by their misery, bearing the cross
They fell down in Babylon
Useless

Week XXII: Babel, Pt. 2 - Made Flesh

Stepping into rising sun
And burning in the face of God
They held their course and ventured forth
To spread the word upon the earth

Behold the light and plant a seed
A lineage from which to spring
With hands like dust of pages swept
To lift the branches from the dirt

Cast your gaze and see the makers
Bursting forth as blossoms follow fire
The echo of creation's voice
A choir awakened, breathing

The words made flesh with shaking steps

Obeyed the mouths of animates

And rolled about the palates, lips

Suffusing symbols with consonance

Infused with blood and welling up
With tears borne of a fallen soul
The words found characters inside
And wept for ink to please the scribes

The writers of the book of life
Beheld the words beyond the veil
Beyond the reach of muting hands
Their incantations rose aloft

And so above, as below
The book was blackened with their speech
The stain eternal, carnal sin
They carried in their mouths

Accepting stress and accents
Indelible marks upon their flesh
That they might be remarkable
For swallowing their flight from God

As grapes fermented, words were pressed
A nobler nectar to impart
The flavour of its art, its timbre
Their lips caressing every letter

Each one fruit upon their tongues
Succulent resonant lingual bliss
Their voices bringing forth new life
Labial instruments giving birth

Come hearken to the maiden voices
First to carry forth a song
To cast a seal in living wax
And repossess creation's mantle

Tilling blood into the soil

The words bore fruit and multiplied
That though to dust they would return
The reaper would refuse their urn

Behold the words, transcend the flesh
Enmeshed within divinity
And transience, a melody
The chorus swelling from the ground

In generations, pure in thought
And practiced in the art they knew
Began to unify the minds
Of all who sang and praised the word

The time has come to build anew
A beacon to the word within
The power held in chanting voices
Edifice to language blessed

Though mortal vessels, anagrams
Of life and death in human clay
They sought to take upon themselves
The power that the words command

With toiling hands and tongues to guide
The greatest arts they now possessed
The skyward spire began its climb
The cornerstone their words inscribed