Pantheon of Shadows: Sonnets from a Forgotten Earth

I. The World Without Us
The forests swallowed towers stone by stone,
And oceans sifted cities into sand.
A million years passed—Earth became its own,
Forgot the weight of any human hand.
Yet orbit kept a ghostly ring of steel,
A scattered halo fading in the skies;
When strangers came, they marveled at the feel
Of patterned scars no nature could devise.
They guessed at minds long lost, at hands now dust,
At rituals inscribed in fractured ground.
For every ruin whispered, trust our trust:
Some thinking beings shaped the world they found.
Atop our graves they stood, unsure and awed,
Seeking our world, but meeting only odd.

II. The Triple-Circle Sign
Among the wrecks they found a curious mark—
Three circles joined, surviving everywhere.
No text remained, no pigment, color, spark—
Just shape on shape in rubble laid bare.
From warped foundations, rusted beams, and stone,
The emblem stared in silhouette and frame.
They took it for a god the humans’d known,
A symbol uttered with a sacred name.
They sketched it in their books, with grave delight,
And claimed it ruled the festivals of old—
A guardian of laughter, feast, and night,
Who blessed the world with joy in days untold.
A children’s mouse? No tale survived to tell.
So rose a god from what we dropped and fell.

III. The Quadruped in Pages Worn
Deep in a bog, a single book endured—
A fossil dream of myth and moral lore.
Its pages blurred, its ink no longer pure,
Yet beasts in faint outline still paced the core.
One lion loomed through centuries of stain,
A regal shadow fixed in brittle leaves.
The scholars saw a deity again—
A cosmic guardian sorrow never grieves.
They read the tales as history and law,
Mistook our metaphor for sacred truth,
Proclaimed the beast the judge of what they saw,
A god who shepherded the ancient youth.
Our fiction breathed anew, but strangely bent—
A holy text we never once had meant.

IV. The Pantheon They Made for Us
Thus Mouse and Lion joined in mythic grace,
Twin pillars of a faith we never knew.
They cast our ruins as a temple place,
Our artwork as the creed our hearts held true.
They pieced our remnants into worship’s frame,
Filled voids with reverence, errors, earnest art;
They spoke our symbols with a sacred name
While never glimpsing what we held at heart.
Yet in their longing to understand our kind,
They made of us a story strangely bright—
Reborn from fragments time refused to mind,
Restored in wonder, even in their plight.
And though they never learned the truths we kept,
They honored shadows where our memories slept.