Dear one, I begin, as my heart
sees you leaning against the lintel post,
your eyes wondering at the quiet men
who have brought my message to you.

A flurry of missives, at first, and then drought.
Long days passed while you waited—
Transit ships docked and took flight again,
and still no word from your pilgrim.

On Old Earth, so they say,
ancients constructed a towering spire
a spear piercing the ear of God,
measuring the conceit of Man.

Ten thousand voices sang the hammer refrain
broke bones of earth from their beds,
inspired man-tall stones with motion,
remade the edicts of creation.

Twenty thousands, the feet that struck as one.
Dusty plain, a great echoing drum, beat
thunder against the shuddering sun,
demanding the foothills of heaven reply

A sickness fell upon them then.
A plague of aphasias, a deafening infection
unraveling the weft of their words
and scattering their voices to the horizons.

The tower, forlorn, fell beneath
the wind's shout and the storm's complaint.
The sundered peoples were flung astray,
forgot the chant that had shaken heaven's foundations.

Now every chorus was singly sung
and no response came to cantor's call.

Their muses were likewise disinherited
from the souls they owned—
Poets were born to nations alien to their art,
Ears numb to the rhyme their verse demanded.

Sculptors sat silent before unformed stones,
tools discarded, broken upon yielding rock,
ignorant of the granites that would wake
to the rasp of their hands.

Troubadours wandered roads dark and long
Voiceless until they found the people speaking
An unheard cant—the dialect of their hearts,
the language of their souls.

I have been to Trunal's World,
to the city that was Soassowhee
when it was a village beside an orchard
below a swift-flowing stream.

The libraries of that city are as grains of sand,
each collection as facets of an insect's eye.
I read a treatise of pulsars of the fourth quadrant
writ with letters sun bright on an ebony page,
found a manual of sword-work and sliced
my hands down to bleeding on the iron words.

Handling the tomes on geology set my arms shaking
—a single word is carved upon a sheet of slate.
Their novels of war left my palms black with ash,
my ears cannon-deaf and my eyes wet with weeping.

A scholar set his work before me
displayed beneath an enlarging glass—
a decade's study of the hydrogen atom
compressed to fit the head of a pin.

You wrote, dear one, a year past and more,
and I have delayed so long in reply,
hesitant to send an answer so far,
save that my words were true in form
as well as proper in fact.

You said, dear one, I love you,
Tell me, please, if you feel the same.

Here is your response, writ in soaso voice:
Runes of gold leaf etched upon platinum plate
tracing the mist of my breath, as I spoke the words
whose sound has no echo save the beat of my heart
and no rhyme but the ripple of delighted tears.

Of this declaration, naught remained
but encrusting the plate in jet and tiger-gold topaz.
The casement is the last ivory of Old Earth
bound with a ribbon of my own hair,

and I tremble to hope my words are pleasing to you.