Ziggurats
by David Lawrence Cade

Beige star – banned from the summits,

The next danger in the fault line,

Logo in cuneiform, an offer of the crescent,

Royal birds, peacocks strutting, tails swirling

Promoting towers of virtual Babel 

Stairway ramp like a video-tease from Sargon the Great.

The arrow of stepped pyramids, banner of eagles,

Stylus-navigated, drawn, advertised in the sands

Like an award guide, the background currentless

Arid azirscape, encoded blank for foot servers

In a full jumble, spacers in a jumble of stone in decay

No clear cover, dryly itemized

By the random shaman – zigman - archeologist 

A zenith above the white temple of a desert

Tottering state

Free to go, about back forth 

In cartographer’s froth

Stars in the oriental background

Like heavenly cargo of plumb-lines

Drawn by polytheistic priests 

Champions of vowel fraud, dialect in limbo

Modern scene of separation telling

The tree in relief sculpture 

Of artist’s flying thumbs, 

A plumb-line version of earth, sky, water, fire

In two-dimensional verticals, horizontal spacers

In giving to the civilized, a civilization unequaled

Top alpha, top sounds,

An epic speaking of pilgrimage

A by-product of Arabic designs

When the sun bows for another day

Amid resurrected walls,

Stars over Eridu, Eanna, Ur falling

Over the syndicated content, bird-style

Of ziggurat camels, abandoned stone beasts

Seas that will boil in August heat

Yet ever live whatever the crimes 

Of modern paradise 

Leaving the Sumer side spot dark until tomorrow

Uruk – the double question

Eanna, the question doubled

Aquifer of Larsa, co-authored 

By distant mountains put in motion

By concentric layers of the builders’ quests

Diamond home, faceted walls

Highlights of the menu season

Sub-square, sub-tilt

The black page of history shimmering

Without logo of the burning years

The front, newly fallen under the weight

Of fatal style sheet millennia 

Point-bulleted on the circular stone quarries

Inevitable logo of a world garden 

Words of peace

A world of atoms well seen between new points

Trembling under the weight of one atom,

Mountain birds without discourse or song

Yet a single merchantable prayer,

Space for images of Gilgamesh and frogs

Hellenistic icon, virtually taking idols 

Invisible head empty, at the logo entry

The photo quote in marble and bricks of clay

Trans-Tigris, trans the blue sky

Over the no exclamation point desert

It is about the migration of sons and tribes

Sheiks, the plumb-line on the vertical

The bio of the divinity visage

The polytheistic jumble

The hope line, the One beyond everything

The independent cave creations in edit mode

In the logo query of history

Upon the rocks substantive, yet not a king,

Poor young orphaned Iraq, heritage of treasures looted

In the arch cross-section of Nippur

The arch devotee of ask icons,

And art now, the command 

"Do then know the unknown, 

"City states disrobed."

Tablets from Nineveh, the commentary gift,

Copied, constituting mound prophet 

Ziggurat prophet,

Of fiction galleries and reborn image spaces

The terra of poetry ruins, pyramids wise

Their site mandated, the top graph stepped

Arabic blue, or Chinese cover globe

The logo middle for other surrealisms searched -

A road into the deserted past

Of a menu-array patient in adversity

Details jumbled on the faraway inquiry

Brought to ruins,

Charity of the ancients -

Today’s verse libre entering the Mesopotamian id.