Written at Easter 2004 in a quiet, sheltered village-in-a-valley watching people retreat from the night and silence outside to electric lightbulbs and TVs inside.........
Tonight, Twilight tarried barely long enough
To steal the last, lingering sounds from a weary world
And cloak itself with the distance now denied
To even the most deeply dilated pupils,
Before taking its leave of the be-nighted,
Consigning us to the capricious will of the West Wind,
That chill harbinger of dead of night.
Between the one departure and the other impending arrival
Our valley wore a vacuum as a shroud:
Invisible, yet tangible, visceral,
Its presence hanging heavy upon the air;
Silent, still its soundlessness resounded,
Imposing itself long and loud upon empty eardrums.
Strange how unworldly becomes the world
Stripped bare of the machines and machinations of men,
Stripped back to the basics of being -
To naked Nature’s bone.
Are we become so alien to our only Eden
That we would presume to deny her Paradise?
How long ‘till we dare dream again of building Babel,
And fashioning ‘perfection’ after our own image?
Tony Jolley
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/aliens-in-eden/
