Semite tribespeople cut a swathe through all of Shinar like a hot knife through a cold carcass following their success on the plain of Sumer Babylonia grew to be one million perched on a sea of subterranean glass as its people ate cakes of grain as Hammurabi the law maker walked proud through halls of reflected gold Babylon’s gardens were inverted, vines and flower cascaded down buttresses where Nebuchadnezzar built with fifteen million bricks supplicants walked through great Ishtar gate god of moon sword of iron there was a common tongue of stone – cuneiform mothered a language spoken so Adam could understand man and the nine gods who both protected and incited great fear Nergal of the  underworld bringing famine and war while Marduk Babylon’s god was worshipped rising in heaven with Jupiter’s submerged red cave with the flight of hoopoe and swallow there was love for the fullness of air farmers tilled the soil with barley and wheat while pig and sheep wandered the fields breezes ambled through date palms catching sides of mudbrick mules licked hooves tickled in the warm melody which fell from sungod Shamash who ruled the day while at night stars shone incandescent following an arc through the great vault to where women’s journeys from the fields were stroked by filaments of fine stone outlining angels but it was not enough for Hammurabi who challenged the gods with a great sword Babel a tower reaching to heaven unreached by man sited in old Nineveh people cried out in fear and Nannar god of wisdom sent tracts of moon to Uruk to wake the man who had seen the abyss