After Babel
What moved the men of Shinar
to build with brick and slime
their storied tower?
Was it a name
that kept them unified?
And why should God
destroy this unity
scattering them one by one
across the world?
I’ve never mastered
another tongue
always wondering
what was the language that we lost
the Ur-Sprache,
the babble we once shared
and whether it reappears unwittingly
in a mother’s lulling of a child,
the dialects of love,
our gestures when another suffers pain,
the will to give.
These are the bricks
we’ve always used to build
not only towers and walls
but simple, open places where we can live and breathe
and may still do.
by Michael Jackson
from Dead Reckoning
Auckland University Press, 2006
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