I AM THE ONE

I am the One that was and was not born,

Inscrutable, unspoken in my names.

Blessing and scourge within the hidden depths,

I shut the lions’ mouths, that in their rage

They shall not fasten tooth or claw on you.

White ichor drained from demons overthrown,

A pinch of bitter herbs, black venom pooled—

This draught I mingle, healing wounded souls

And stirring what was latent, still and dread.

Powers and nether spirits, with hushed pleas,

Abide untold, beyond men’s narrow ken,

Breathing through wordless witchcraft’s art.

Behold from height the shattered works of old,

The stones half-swallowed in advancing sand,

Preserved for ages, dreamless in their sleep,

In darkness poured on land and sea and air.

No deities bestow’d the deathless life

Their worshippers had craved—a gift withheld.

From hunger for self-wrought worth and meaning,

First tremors woke the long-enslumbered mind.

The night’s held breath calls myth from buried time,

Enchanted in carved signs’ slow weathering,

And Jurassic ammonites, whose coiled shells

Glimmer as iron pyrite, fool’s gold flame.

Headless, the serpents rest in ring and loop;

Stamped with forgetful lore through time’s far drift,

They hardened into rock and lost their tongue.

His forethought shaped the worldly frame from clay,

And gave it an uplifted, yearning soul

To climb by gaze star-inhabited heights;

Yet Muses’ truth lay speechless in the spark—

The perilous and saving light of fire.

Then Evil from the brink of heaven stooped,

Bearing Fate’s treachery, a weight of doom

They clasp and cannot loosen from their hands.

The brazen spindle of stern Moira turned,

Spinning a doleful portion out to each,

Where vital force confronts the end of hope,

And finds in death the chains drawn tight anew.

Open your eyes, you who would take up sides.

Unseen, false gods with many-masked deceit

Breathe war into the hearts of mortal kind,

To rear the strong like towers, high and hard,

And, in their greatness, cast them down.