Out from Babel #1

February 2009

In the tradition of finding new perspectives, and with perhaps some debt to Neal Stephenson and Snow Crash (very little, but you should read it anyway).

---

Cool tree blowing in a lyric wind,
Babylon choir on an outstretched limb,
Blue sky stretching like a desert hymn
With no color of night or morning.

Like a coward the desert slipped out
from our footsteps and returned
the following night. We carried our water
in mason jars and we slept like masons
and we hummed like open jars,
for we could place no word before another.

Still I treasured most keshrai, meaning waterfowl,
meaning gone from our silted streams and embittered
ponds. Each among us carried one lost
word from the mother tongue, and as must
made other words to cover this,
until his mind was whole and
his throat blank as riverstone.

So one was named Aqueduct and another
bore Arbalest, and we found Song
among six scattered parties, each with no
reckoning of his kin. Aimless we tracked
across unknown spaces, bereft of distances
and times. In the drive to know, one man gave names
to every grain of sand along our path.

These names, too, were lost,
for he perished before we reached the deltas.