New Babel

after a year we found a way to stop spinning
Yes, we still loved our hurricane, but we looked around
Up - riotous stars playing hide-n-seek,
but instead they count to 7 million years
Left - to dry, orange, grass-less fields
masquerading as desolate
Right - tall, reflective buildings praying
no one will ask how the weather is
because they're hyper-introspective
and they don't want to say, "Well,
the gloom in my spirit quite resembles
a tempest"
Down - impish, hot heat making earth into glass
so we can look up the skirts of cultures
that don't make sense to us

it's funny how closing one eye takes us further
than keeping both open
as if the mountains know we are lopsided and primal,
but that we also tend our flower gardens
we stop because our hands are blistered
from searching through Babel's rubble
trying to find the bricks that were holy.
made by bodies in love for a common end
Babel had good stones, wrought from unity
the problem was that it was tower
and not a city, meandering up and away,
trying to escape

but we will win the world back and make
a sprawling and wond'rous city
where no one speaks the same language
but everyone is understood because
all words are spoken between the heights of
12 and 144 inches
where everyone has to convert inches to meters
to miles to fluid ounces, 'cause they want to get lost

our city will be chaotic, colorful in nameless
varieties of green and crimson, water will always be cold
brows will always be warm, sticky with sweat
and unruly wisps of hair
every day we will be astonished by the growing
bounds of our affection for our home and for
how our home is our legs and
dipping toes into new sand
and for how sand is actually weathered glass,
whether or not that makes sense
(How? How is it soft?)

touch my lips "for I come from a people of unclean lips"
burn me with smoldering
coal from forging fires to keep the creeping,
violet cold at bay
for while we build our city we must
serve as the builders and the wall for we are
the blessed saints of Nehemiah and we
sleep with one eye open
because noisy sponsors tear down projects
that have failed before
but they don't know enough languages to silence us
they don't know the anguishes that would teach them
not to silence us

so for now, we weep and cry Shalom
so for now, we weep and cry for home
amen and let it be so.