La Maison De Dieu
This is the Tarot card of now:
and itŐs not an image
of a lightning struck tower
with its falling masonry and figures
it is the thing itself
it is transposed into
as each plane strikes
turned into an oven from the inside
exploding in terrible flame
as the nightmare begins
and the faces appear at the windows
helpless, beyond reach...
You watched them falling
It is those who chose to die
in a clean plummeting of air
ItŐs those who stood below
crushed by its tidal breaking
It is the face of a priest asleep
whose prayer fell from the sky
that move you
Not the tower, the towers
in their thousand feet of silver
shimmering, mercurial and inflated
Not the towers that was
the Babel of its own security
but the human lives it sacrificed
And what it is to be brought to its root
in these latter days, long foreseen
that is what has to crash
before we can live as one
universal people
All that has been built up
that has to fall
you know it
itŐs not the rhetoric of war
that can answer it...
Zealots gave their lives for it
and it is possible, you ask,
irate, American, as you are
as something else comes over your face
that they did this for love too
or if not love, for the truth?
A terrorist truth is not love
or love as we know it
but one thing is beyond dispute
the secret doorway this tower leads to
that is the end of all vanity
blown open forever now-
where flame and blood and water come streaming,
it is the heart of our world opening
that buckles with these buildings
and every other tower that remains
that can draw lightning
Not the spire vanishing into the blue
or where the muezzin call at evening
and the dervish turns and turns
without holding on to anything...
But you, as you wander the darkening streets
dust still hanging in the smoke-think air
without quite knowing
where you are going
or where all of this is leading
This is the Tarot card of now
held in anyone's fingers
in three and four dimensions all around us
and what it spells is GRAIL among the ruins
Jay Ramsay
England