Poetry

The Dark Tower

Child Rowland to the dark tower came.

His word was still "Fie, foh, and fum,

I smell the blood of a British man."

- King Lear, Act III

“Nobody knows what happens after that,

Once you’ve blown the horn. Just get that note

And sound it long and loud. That’s what you do:

Just make it to the dark tower, stand, and blow.”

“What’s in the dark tower?” “Didn’t I just say?

Nobody knows at all. They don’t come back.

Your dad, his teachers, all your ancestry;

It isn’t clear how many men succeed.

“You have to find the place, and that is hard.

It’s not on maps; and many fall aside

Their bodies found years later unburied.

You must do it. It keeps the land alive.

The darkness takes the land if no one blows.”

These were his lessons, and why he was born.

On no specific day the boy set out

To find the dark tower and to sound the horn.

Out there, let us be brief, there was a waste.

The land, as it was called, was doomed

A universal mess and communist

For bio-engineered men of the future.

He trod on dead men’s armour in the mud

The bodies of the men who went before.

He came to London, looking for the Tower

And found more of the men of waste, that crowd

Who sweat for money, everybody equally oppressed

And there were dead men, too, walking around

All infinitely sure that they are right.

Is it that sound of weeping, what is that sound?

The ghosts of traitors drift about the air

While ancient things are ruined and undone

He saw them neutered, stupid, having nothing.

Beyond the battlefield of the Ukraine,

Where this disgusting fight was at its worst

The boy’s strength failed, and people here and there

Instructed him it was better just to quit.

Here God is still upon the cross; and in despair

They talk and work at making themselves gods.

By some perversity he carried on.

And there, the hill on which he would be broke

Could just be seen amidst the fire and smoke.

“Now for my ancestors, and for the law,

And God, and all the saints, I’ll blow the horn.”

It was a land without a human being

And many hills, the biggest of them this,

Where that the tower rose all black and hot

And dripping with the shades of evil things

A blasted tree had bodies hung about

Of honest people; here everybody hangs.

It was impossible to see, but he could hear

Distinctly, the approving voices saying

“Go on, lad, you have made it, now the note”

And such encouragements inside his ear.

He brought the horn up, standing to attention

And thinking dimly of his distant home

He blew the note toward the gates.

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.