BABEL

How many miles to Babylon?


  Listen to the spirit language 
  in silence

  Is there a voice?
  No human voice.

  Words?
  They are unbidden, uncalled for:

  All the words in the world
  but that we seek
  Unwordly, unworldly, unsounded.

To get there
and back again
no need to count the miles
but kindle the flame
which flickers, falters
for a candle space
a candle time.

Listen! - they are timeless,
the smooth words flowing,

Hardening to roughness:
  corrugations
   in the runnels 
    of history.

BABEL

Tower

"nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do"

Genesis II.6

They built it to climb to God
but he descended their stair,
Twisted tongues of each of them
gaping empty air

Speechless
averting
faces from Heaven
they laboured apart

-restrained
from common bonds
imagined diversely,
strove vainly.

So each of us
stretching across the sundered plain
to grasp hands in friendship
finds again
a piece of broken foundation stone -
not from a tower of burnt clay and slime
but a bower in Eden at an end of time.

And Babylon -

"I will make of it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction" 

 Isiah XIV.23

How many miles ...?

(the light begins to fade

words fail in the flicker

of a candle flame and trickle

away, gaining no hold,

dissolve and are made rough again:

corrugations of wax

in the runnels of history)

... by candlelight

but not back again

to any stone-built tower,

to any kindled flame.

Light ebbs to flow 

around our darkness.

Bālāl

Gate of God
Or the God of the Gate?


What do we know?


Only words, which confuse us.
Language, which leaves us
Bereft of its significance.

Hanging Garden

“the approach to the garden sloped like a hillside and the several parts of the structure rose from one another tier on tier”

Diodorus Siculus 

Were trees dependent
On terraces,
Was earth banked
(treasured loam in lime-clad stone),
Did the wind sing of weeping
In dangling leaves
Euphrates via Archimedes
To wet those roots
And dampen those notes
Sounding lost love?

Or did these words make
A shape in air?