National Poetry Month: Day #27

Few things in this world better represent mankind's tenacity than the subject of this poem:

The Tower

From the first ring of stones
set in the sand and shells
of the field of miracles,
the widow's tower, begun
by sixty coins in remembrance
of the Holy Virgin,
leaned,
its twin at flawed conception
a thousand years of engineering
hope.

From their first misguided corrections
men have struggled to put right
or to preserve,
to hold off, if only for the moment
of their lifetimes,
the inevitable surrender
to gravity.

©2001 L.A. Smith.