the root word of babble is babel
Glory of the Latin
of the dead and their grammar
composed entirely of decay.
—Gbenga Adesina, “Glory”
we have many things to teach our dead
but they are all busy sleeping when not
fighting over a plot of graveyard. for in
-stance, the cure for vertigo is to cut off
the head of the task force who still insists
on working despite the fatigue of tongues,
instead of assent or further ascent. they got
it wrong from the start, building toward
one tower, disappointed at their retreating
god, pierced by the winding spires. they
should have erected many towers like we
now do, instead of burning incense smoke
that climbs far lower than the mushroom
clouds that we now grow, seeded from
a nuclear bomb over cities still shivering
from radiation. we aren’t blameless neither.
for instance, for every tower that Peachtree
street has sprouted, there are still so many
roaming unhinged, reaching for an imaginary
bough. but we are not here to judge the living
and the dead tongues, but to simply ask why
the two-way mirror is the same as a one-way
mirror; why cleave antagonizes cleave in its
slow fracture; why a lover that wants to be left
alone is not also asking to be abandoned
Source: Poetry (January/February 2024)