Voice of the Bells

The bells of Old North Church tolled nine times over Boston,
calling a requiem for humanity.
There under that watchful eye
had risen modernity from the primordial bath of antiquity,
and there modern man stole the reigns of his own fate;
bloodying tooth and claw in ever-steeper ascent.
This silent watcher, relic of ancient days, knew well
that soon the conquerors would race to the top of even its own steeple
and bury it in their wake,
leaving the past to decay underground.

And so the funeral bells rang out not in prophecy but in warning:
"O man,
yearn not foolishly for the past,
for growth is engraved deeper in thy synapses
than in even the Redwood.
Forget not, though,
that severance from thy root is death
and it is the weed and not the tree which chokes out all other life,
it is the tree and not the weed which survives Winter's silent rage."

Big Ben struck midnight over a sleeping London,
where the children of Babel dreamt of a brave new world,
a world in which they climbed the heights of heaven to be gods,
never considering that only Earth's embrace could sustain them.