The Scattering

Tower of Babel. 2200 B.C.

Neither Bruegel or Escher had it right. 
They were painters not builders; certainly not
scholars either.

The tower was neither round nor an anomaly of perspective.
It was erected within the two walls surrounding the city and
shaped as a ziggurat.

The area of the tower, in the precinct of Jupiter Belus,
was enclosed by solemn, restrictive brass gates.

The ziggurat was shaped as a pyramid with several flat layers
each with a tower.
The first and largest was a furlong square,
the next smaller, and so on up to eight layers with a pathway,
large enough for horses and carriages,
leading around and up, spiraling to the very top.

The tower was a fine orange-red, the riches of the
clay from the Plain of Shinar, and it reached a furlong
into the heavens.  Quite clearly a furlong!
The ambitious bricks yearned skyward.

I remember it was the 21st of the month.
There was a waning moon in the early morning sky, its
scatterlight punctuated by rapidly moving dark clouds.
As workers we often slept in the heights to be ready for
the next day.
We were not astronauts but we found heightened excitement
in observing the world from above.

Orders and supplies had to be carried by baskets raised and
lowered.
And there it was around noon that day…a basket of straw
raised from below.
Yet I requested burnt clay bricks and mortar mixed with
bitumen. 

That basket was the beginning of chaos.

Nimrod, as king of Babylon, had thought to build a tower
threatening heaven.
Tyrant, he held us all in plan, one world…a harbor of unity,
a beneficial theme for his arrogant scheme to rule the universe.
And, I admit, we readily shared his vision.  

One world, an order not fertile for curiosity or vision. 

Silfan de kaw tuet.  The man who stood before me, I knew as
laborer. 
This day, his was not a language I understood.  All around
syllables and sounds I puzzled at as if they came through
netting.  A Hitchcock surprise.

In the confusion and conflict, work ceased.  All was
frustration, anger.  Sense was tangled…tunneled.
Meaning perished like a spinning worm burrowing into the dust.

And in this clotted time, after long months, on the edge
of circumstance,
when remembrance turned on itself, I discovered meaning
where there had been none. 
The absence spoke but not in an auditory way.

I found that man was generally threatened more by his own
inadequacies than those of others.
And I felt grace to drive my destiny…in freedom
of spirit…and thanked God for the gift to see
what cannot be built by another.

Just then, catching my attention, as if to punctuate my thought,
a dragonfly, iridescent green, skating
across the water of the ornamental fountain, climbed
the shimmering reflection of the tower.