from places where the winds begin

and fogs are born with mist children,

tall men from tall rocky slopes came

and sleepy men from sleepy valleys,

their women tall, their women sleepy,

with bundles and belongings,

with little ones babbling, “Where to now?

what next?”

The people of the earth, the family of man,

wanted to put up something proud to look at,

a tower from the flat land of earth

on up through the ceiling into the top of the sky.

And the big job got going,

the caissons and pilings sunk,

floors, walls and winding staircases

aimed at the stars high over,

aimed to go beyond the ladders of the moon.

And God Almighty could have struck them dead

or smitten them deaf and dumb.

And God was a whimsical fixer.

God was an understanding Boss

with another plan in mind,

And suddenly shuffled all the languages,

changed the tongues of men

so they all talked different

And the masons couldn’t get what the hodcarriers said,

The helpers handed the carpenters the wrong tools,

Five hundred ways to say, “W h o a r e y o u?”

Changed ways of asking, “Where do we go from here?”

Or of saying, “Being born is only the beginning,”

Or, “Would you just as soon sing as make that noise?”

Or, “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.”

And the material-and-supply men started disputes

With the hauling gangs and the building trades

And the architects tore their hair over the blueprints

And the brickmakers and the mule skinners talked back

To the straw bosses who talked back to the superintendents

And the signals got mixed; the men who shovelled the bucket

Hooted the hoisting men—and the job was wrecked.

Some called it the Tower of Babel job

And the people gave it many other names.

The wreck of it stood as a skull and a ghost,

a memorandum hardly begun,

swaying and sagging in tall hostile winds,

held up by slow friendly winds.

4

The people know what the land knows

the numbers odd and even of the land

the slow hot wind of summer and its withering

or again the crimp of the driving white blizzard

and neither of them to be stopped

neither saying anything else than:

“I’m not arguing. I’m telling you.”

The old timer on the desert was gray

and grizzled with ever seeing the sun:

“For myself I don’t care whether it rains.

I’ve seen it rain.

But I’d like to have it rain

pretty soon sometime.

Then my son could see it.

He’s never seen it rain.”

“Out here on the desert,”

said the first woman who said it,

“the first year you don’t believe

what others tell you

and the second year you don’t

believe what you tell yourself.”

“I weave thee, I weave thee,”

sang the weaving Sonora woman.

“I weave thee,

thou art for a Sonora fool.”

And the fool spoke of her,

over wine mentioned her:

“She can teach a pair of stilts to dance.”