Dialects of Human

In Babylon, the works of men,
Hands crabbing in the dirt,
Raise edifices to the sky.

Gods in human form,
Receive this Halleluiah!

Be very sure; creation
Has run backwards.
God, we cry out, is good,
But mean, are we not good also?

We, too brief for goodness…

Praise so finely rendered
From here to heaven, is a tithe
Of all earthly glory, deep and secretly
Hoarded in the pockets of priests
And self-appointed kings.

God receives
His share of Hosannas
While a shameful currency
Is forged in the coin of worship.
The things of God are apportioned;
Human things, the spoils, furtively divided.

Words come down
To meaninglessness,
Unconsecrated nothings.
Our song of celebration falls
To barking orders and spite,
Edict, holy stricture, interdiction.

So we are parted, one from another
And from the humanity of our mouths:
Language dead on our lips, sense so stretched,
Our tongues, cloven, stutter it.

Keep the truth at bay, in silence,
Keep the truth from coming out.
Lest, unguarded we find ways
To tell apart, each from each,
Slave from master, good from bad,
One by one, one from the other.

But all the words behind our pursed lips
Are dumb. They make us speechless.
They make instruction easier to hear. So it is ordered:
We scratch the dirt, build our churches of futility,
Praise our betters while they filch devotion from us.

Otherwise we might speak from the heart
Or, heart to heart, learn to listen in tongues;
Build tomorrow, not a temple for it.

Else be bricks
In a wall
In Babylon.

© BH 2016

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There was a spat about language. The usual thing: yours is just a dialect, not like ours, a proper language. It's linguistic imperialism, in my view. Not just between languages spoken in these islands: Scots, Gaelic, English.

I thought, of course, what a narrow definition of language involves. It's control. One group makes the rules and sets the parameters of expression through which knowledge and power area transmitted. Lesser languages, dialects, become reduced to those of the powerless. What comes out of such beings is unrefined, uneducated, inferior.

Fundamentally, we all speak dialects of human. I give even the detractors the honour of that.