We Built This City

Perservering to build
a modern-day medieval
city

to transport us to
another time and
place.

The renaissance of
the gong
chases away evil
spirits, warns of
interlopers, heals
the sick, and
invokes the dead.

Surrounded by a
permanent unbroken
wall,

erected in solidarity,
fortified by the toil
of limestone poets
and sandstone novelists
building a collective
tomorrow.

Building communal
walls around an
island in a tidal
estuary,

the strata on which
the walls are built,

prone to subsidence
and constant ebb
and flow

and nature's feudal
emotions and
idiosyncrasies.

Unified intelligentsia,
following the directive of
their lead poet,

archaeologists
access the vulnerability
assailed by tide.

We built this city Wall
on a gravel bed with rubble
and mortar.

The advent of artillery, the
Wall becomes redundant
as a defensive structure.

The novelist inspects
projecting pilasters of
superb erotic sculpture,
stone lotus and dancing
nymphs carved on the
caryatid.

The lead poet summons
his well-read, calciferous
disciples to the freestanding 
stone wheels under the
chariot pulled by celestial
stone equines, to the
heavens,

and the lead poet recites

building a collective
tomorrow.

We Built This City.

Copyright 2005 Sage Sweetwater, firebrand lesbian novelist