Roofs and Walls

[Meeting Minute 1809]

1

It was an easy mistake to make:
Not fixing the ladder to the wall
Because, of all forces of nature,
Gravity is the most elusive.

On the slate roof, all the way down,
You remembered fear of falling;
You clutched at the gutter,
In as many seconds thought better of it:
The expense, the inconvenience,
Of all your labours undone.

In the end, the ground broke your fall;
Despite the ladder’s splintered rungs,
Only grazes to show for it; dark bruises
Under the skin, for safety’s sake,
Pain as a reminder.

2 

If only building for ourselves
Was the summit of our ambition;
But we must rise over everything
To prove we are invincible.

Roofs and walls: metaphors
For the eternal journey to become
What we are not, sometime soon,
Not yet,
Becoming.

Pile the beams, build and build;
Stone, slate, and mortar,
Malleable knowledge in our hands,
Our complicated schemes, precision
And the fruits of our effort,
Our foresight and our vision,
Lift us higher and higher.

How miraculous we are
Until one easy mistake
Cuts us loose
On the long slide back
Down to earth.

© BH, 2017

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After a long gestation, this distilled itself. Nobody likes to be reminded of a lapse of practicality, especially when gravity is involved. A friend (who will remain nameless) survived such a lapse and, you know, it may be valuable to learn the self-build lesson in the experience.

But then, with my penchant to see every commonplace as an allegory for the hunan condition, well, I had to take it further. So there, one person’s mistake with a ladder equates to the hubris of human ambition.

True enough, we now have a world where too many unsecured ladders are propped against walls. Waiting…

The image is a reworking of Escher's 'Belvedere'.