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