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The Bell Tower That Leaned In

I. The Pastor’s Hand

At dawn’s brittle cusp—
  he climbs, each step
    a nail in time’s coffin
  breath ragged
    a Psalm torn mid-hymn.

The rope tastes of incense and myrrh—
  Liberty’s fracture
    braided through its fibers
  a wound
    that never quite healed.

He pulls—
  clang—

  a bell toll
    from Poe’s cathedral of despair
     a hymn of blood-ink
      and rusted breath.

The shadows coil;
  scripture frays.
Faith flickers—
  does anyone still hear?

Each toll
  an exorcism.
Each silence—
  reproof.

II. The Town’s Celebration

Midnight’s spine splinters—
  rockets scream
    like seraphim undone.

The bell convulses in bronze jubilee
  a copper throat
    ruptured with Hemingway’s dread.

“For whom,”
  it mutters beneath the blaze—
    but no one listens.

Children suck sweetness
  from sulphur
lovers cling beneath the clang,
  their shadows etched
    in cobblestone fog.

Old men raise cracked chalices—
  liquid memories.

The tower disrobes.
  It dances.
    It bleeds.

III. The Lovers’ Tryst

(overlapping the Pastor’s sermon)

Here—
  the world blurs
    to charcoal.

They carve names
  in limestone flesh
    a scar older
     than forgiveness.

Their memories
  thread the bell’s
    unspoken prayer—
a psalm of mouths
  and ink-stained breath.

It does not toll.
  It listens.

Their hearts throb
  against the rusted must
    pulses striking time
     like flint against flint.

Below—
  the town melts
    into watercolors.
Moonlight spills like wine
  over copper skin.

The past folds
  like origami cranes
    left in rain.

IV. The Tourist’s View

He climbs—
  camera held
    as relic or rosary.

Light breaks
  between lancet panes.
Streets below:
  runes, scars, equations.

He speaks the town aloud—
  each name
    an invocation.

He is dizzy
  with witness.

The bell does not toll.
  It withholds.

The silence
  is not absence—
    It is prophecy.

V. The Final Ascent

(voices blur — Pastor fades, Lovers pulse, Town distorts)

Night, hollowed
  to bone.

Hands claw at stone:
  brittle gospel.

The rope—
  untouched.
The bell—
  unswung, waiting.

He climbs
  through the relics
    of devotion—

Vows crumbling in lichen.
  Prayers wrapped
    in rust.

The bell looms—
  a maw of iron
    swallowing liturgy
     and hallelujahs alike.

  No blessing.
    No rebuke.

He steps
  beyond breath.

The bell does not toll—

  but the tower
    leans inward.

Not in judgment.
Not in mourning.
  In final witness.

VI. Metapoetic Echo

(outside the tower, outside time)

The bell tolls still—
  not in bronze
    or rope
     or lung

but in the trembling script
  of memory.

This poem
  folds itself
    around the silence
     echo chasing echo
      word chasing wound.

A bell is a mouth.
A poem, too.
  Both toll.
    Neither forgets.

VII. The Universal Toll

For whom does it toll
  when time buckles
    under relics?

The tower holds us all—
  pastor, mourner
    lover, pilgrim
       birth, life
          death.

The bell answers
  not with clang—

but with
  heartbeat
    muse
     word.

The toll
  is not theirs.

It is ours.
  It has always been.

Copyright © Daniel Henry Rodgers

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