Tear Down the Walls

Tear down the walls, tear down the palaces
Whose glory is a memory more sunless than our own.

These are tall shadows on the blighted earth
Spreading and lengthening as the day falls into the night
As we fall into our night, as every one of us
Will fall, and the always taller black
Fall with us.

What ghost knows where he goes
Or when he'll meet his brothers at what midnight?
What shall he say to them among the shadows?
Unhappy spirits squinting at the light,
History's blind and lame, the stunted ones.

Oh, not to them but to the living others
We say:
Tear down these walls, even though the sun
Must still go down and night come on
Wherever any one of us may walk;
Tear down these palaces whose past is lost,
Before they fall and falling crush us...

From the poem, Tear Down the Walls, by T. C. Wilson