TOWER TO THE PEOPLE

(nearing the end of Poetry Month)

The builders converge, to reach for heaven,
The glory of all man, embodied - physically proven;
To defy nature - that ever-limiting gravity,
Nature: that avaricious self-centered greed.

But selfish Jehovah, His divine authority unsung,
Plants divergent syllables upon their tongues.
The builders slaughter each other, punished for their over-pretentious sin,
Leaving the discontinued tower to the elements, to ruin.

The tower crumbles, its fighting, bearded builders dead,
"Power to the people," its tattered façade once read.
Scattered weeds, striving vainly for the sky,
Among the abandoned rubble - forsaken corpses lonely lie.

Then wrathful lightning thunders into the ground,
The rain of common sense showers down,
Washing away the engineers' bodies.
As onlookers chide: "Look here, children, the building was much too shoddy."

After the storm, the rainbow's end brings us nowhere,
As the remaining colored pillars fall, disintegrating,
Raising Soviet dust, into the air,
While the lone poet ponders, contemplating.

Alongside, the road signs rusted; the roads - untended sludgy mire;
"Which way to utopia?" the poet inquires.
Nobody knows, nobody cares, as the poet sighs;
The apathetic pedestrians walk on, living to die.

"Communism is dead!"
The people's blood: orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, not red;
The masses, with feet shackled, faces covered with makeup, and minds idle:
"Hey, let's watch American Idol."

The tower, engineered of, and for men.
Oh to erect that defiant obelisk once again!
Once more to dream, to theorize, to aspire:
The entire human story upon that ever-high spire.