You’ll know the photograph,
legs dangling from girders,
spik, polak, yid, paddy, nigger, wop,
the Rockefeller Building, rising like sap,
how, freed from one hell or another,
                                                   tempest-tost,
they washed up at the golden door.

There is more than one tower
in which language might ferment.

We never knew how many
till we saw it in the papers,
names from every land
thrown across the news
of every land.
                          The many tongues
in the one tower, in the more
than one tower, hanging,
                                              as they do,
hanging in Rotterdam and Vienna,
in student flats, church halls, cafes,
in another painting by Breughel.

There are towers that make gods jealous
towers that make men jealous
and there are tongues,
                                          those that ask,
those silenced, those not yet understood,
                                                           those lost,
those I have to strain to hear,

not wanting ever again to see
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky.