Your Time Upon The Tower Poem by Seamus O' Brian

Like the retreating tide-
That battle line of the ocean’s mass
relinquishing its power in rippling eddies
and fingers of water grasping, scraping at the mud
as they are dragged back into blackness of the depths
where the blind fish hunt among the bones
of ships lost from the light of the sun
and from the thoughts of men,
And backward lapping waves reveal
The rise of glutinous mudbanks
The death smell of fish and crabs and muck.

So too retreats our poetry.
Our thoughts.
Our conviction.

I cast words and lines awkwardly across the
Last waves of an ocean filled with
Too many words and the babbling
Of too many fools. My words drift
Silently down, sinking particles of debris
Ignored by the mass of the ocean’s surround.

The Remnants, though, they cast their lines
Gossamer threads, gold translucence of
Brilliance shimmering in the sinking sun
And their brilliance falls through the
unmoved ocean of useless words like the dung
of fish whose bowels cannot abide
such an abyss of ignorance.
And the mudbanks rise, and the stench of death
becomes comfortable, like home.

So too sinks our poetry.
Our thoughts.
Our conviction.

Ivory fingers push up through the cloying
Soil of a thousand philosophers’ graves
Bones bleached eons white thrust their wordless
Accusations into faces paralyzed by amusement
And cry out, 'What will YOU do? ! ! '

Like the tide sucked down to the ocean's depths,
So the bones of great men dead
Are sucked from the ground by the vacuum
Of our indifference, our well-leisured apathy.
To demand from us the answer they dread.

You have been given a nation forged from
the stone and the timber and the steel
of a brutal wildness that would only yield
to the grim strength of hands hardened by
frost and pestilence and hunger.

A nation whose foundation was hammered
down by generations past upon
the bones of their children
and the graves of their dreams
and the conviction that seeds
of freedom sown in peril would yield
a harvest one day to come.

So they embraced the gaunt corpse of Hunger
and danced with Death, and stared in his eyes
all night for a morning that would not come.
these farmers, these soldiers, these slaves
who tore from the forest their homes,
and their crops from the stones. Who
yanked the steel from the ground to
stitch together with wagon wheels
and railroad ties a nation from land
unmapped, untamed, unknown.

And they wait for an answer
for what will you do
with the seeds they have planted
with the bones of their children.

For upon this foundation there rises a tower
built with the timbers of wisdom-
the genius of Persia and Greece,
The wisdom of Rome and the East.


A tower mortared by tireless inquiry
Of generations lost to the mists of time
Tempered by the fires of war
and guarded by the diligence of scribes.
A treasure of knowledge and wisdom gathered up
through blood and sweat and fire
and laid at your feet.

A tower of Babel ascending to the stars
a platform built to address God and His heavens
and the earth below.
The tower upon which you now stand,
with the eyes of heaven upon you,
with the eyes of all who have gone before,
with the eyes of a world crumbling around you,
waiting for your answer.

The generations around you are content
to accept this foundation, this blood-bought liberty,
this ocean of knowledge and with it become
the greatest producer and consumer of
amusement the ages have ever known.
To lie upon couches and clog their hearts
with the fat of the land before ever-enlarging
high definition televised drivel.

But, what about you? With the eyes of heaven
and earth upon you, with the eyes of the living
and the dead, I stand at the edge of this sea
and the shore beyond, and I ask you too,
As I see the edge of my own horizon-
as our poetry sinks,
and our minds,
and our conviction;
as the stench of our leisure and apathy rises
like the muck from an outgoing tide,

What about you, Reader?

What will you do with your time upon the tower?