Towers

Does every tower built to God’s glory

End up as a monument to purely human folly?

In central Bristol, there is a church tower,

Built in the twelfth century for the Knights Templar

And it leans like the more famous tower in Pisa.

It’s been leaning since before it was even finished –

It leans like young locals and party/drug tourists

From the West Country’s far reaches.

From the windows of local offices,

Standing against straight-edged windows that don’t open,

This tower is incongruous:

It’s the only leaning structure in the Office District.

All the church towers and spires in the distance look straight.

(As a sign of a previous time,

It doesn’t remind us of anything

But as I turn back to look in at the office, I think

I am just like it.

I lean, where colleagues stand straight and tall

And I have nothing to say to them at all.)

Next door, there’s an office block

In that peculiar grey brick, specific to

Brutalist 1960s public buildings.

It’s like architects were trying to hold back the tide

Of the psychedelic colour and social change of those days.

(I think it was called Brutalism, anyway –

And, after a quick search of the internet…

What did we do before the internet?

I guess I would have had to guess.

Yes.  I was correct. 
  
 (Another example of Brutalist architecture

Is Preston Bus Station, where I once spent a melancholy hour

On a hot summer day, somehow cold, wrapped in grey concrete,

With no light peering in.

Which was interesting.))

And I wonder if the Knights Templar

Realised their church would still be here

Nearly a thousand years later

(as well as, round the corner, a chain pub that bears their name)

When office workers would stroll the grounds

With take-away coffee, and never even consider – or even notice –

The leaning tower, and its’ stark answer to the post/modern and the secular,

And the technology that now sustains us.

It seems to me a mobile phone mast

From a bygone era – obsolete technology

From an age when an interpreter was required

To read the bible and decipher its signals

And guard the information within,

Interpreting it in the interest of power and order

And buildings keep the unwanted out

And the wanted in,

And facades were almost always intimidating

When Power spoke in symbols

And everybody knew exactly what it was saying.

And I wonder if the basic principles have changed

Or if technology has enabled us

To stay the same

Faster.