Because There Was Babel

They are still falling.
The stones, ancient faces,
each one a tombstone
making a cemetery
of your lawn.

We are all exiles in our skins
flinging gibberish at one another
with hound's determination:

"Listen, about yesterday..."

Perhaps we know that
the only way to comfort a friend
is through mutual desolation,
much like that of the dunes
laced with ivory tusks
the delicate sunburnt spines
of elephants’ demise.

… the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Silence makes for
an excellent abandon
when one can call it solitude.
But can you?
You?
Truly?

Listen— Listen!
Out of your painted rooms
Out of your halls of prayer
Out of your insensate hides
Join the pilgrims' dance
On the black concrete road
Toward a kind of Bethlehem:
This great cacophony
Our discordant Hallelujah
Rives all our loneliness
The projections in the sky
This forlorn universe
A beautiful monstrous useless
Thing.

And then,
as the sun rises
shy between the buildings
and silence flocks home
a prodigal son
lift your head
and listen:

Your poem has made me reflect thus: It is not for nothing that we charge Eliot with elitism for his overt references to other poets. The poem is not accessable to all with your Yeats reference, I thought. But then I realized I had Google, inches away. I therefore wonder at your inclusion of the allusion, in our modern times---has the overt allusion become obsolete? What is it's purpose?

Google is a wonderful thing, I agree.

The allusion does what you want it to do, Brian. Both its relevancy and its purpose are open to your experience as a reader.