Respect

When a great voice leaves the world, the silence is like deep space, dark and infinite.

But then, perhaps a little bit oddly, I thought of a stone tower, square shouldered, and tall, as tall as you can imagine, and right up at the very tip of the tower, so high you wouldn’t be able to tilt your head back far enough to see it, a giant bell.

All around the tower stretches a wide sea of black sand, its dunes rolling like waves to the horizon. Above, the dark sky is half swallowed by a giant planet, gleaming blue and green. The planet looks so close you’d think that if you could climb the tower and reach out you would be able to touch it. But you couldn’t.

A shooting star scratches a line of silver against the night and the tower’s giant bell tolls and if we listen carefully we can hear it, even here, on our world. It tells of passion, righteous and fierce, and it tells of joy.