A season in Hell

Words are the wellspring of all treachery.
Through this language of form is forged a world of
sensuous wonders combining real and unreal
in visionary and hallucinatory projections,
Like a child in all knowing wonder, who is
at once whole and perfect, shattering this reality
with the first utterance of a single syllable.

So all worlds are created, described and destroyed,
A deluge of metamorphoses, theater, magic and fairyland
Fantastic voyages, suffering and flood like clarion bell, forged on
the anvil of the first primordial word that gave existence its birth
And plunged it headlong into its own destruction.
Long before the great towers of men soared into the skies,
Poets made poignant confessions and dramatic narrative
to adapt this reality to another beginning, from darkness into light.

Oh the painful conceit of this! The desperate clinging
of the soul to its mother tongue; Would that the wordsmiths had
fashioned an ark that traveled not forward,
but back, back from the light and into darkness.
Deep in the wells of echoing timelessness
the universes were fashioned here,
Not by their words, but in silence.