simonhlilly

BIOLUMINESCENCE

1

Whether you are mortal or immortal

Just depends on how much

Of your mind you inhabit.

2

Even the gods are constrained by their natures

And the expectations of their worshippers.

Obliged to inhabit forms thrust upon them,

Wearing bodies too tight, too clichéd.

3

The ancestor who lived in a hut on the mountain

Has become the mountain.

The mountain walks out in the morning mists

Along paths of nodding yarrow, cream and pink and golden.

4

His blood has become rivers, his thoughts the vast slow winds,

His desires the vague hopeful hungers and fears

Of small things he hardly sees, so fleeting they have become.

5

Bioluminescence: we travel out on rays of light,

Swaying forests dripping guttering stars.

The pools there, and their reflection,

We take as real to us, a similar mirror-smooth view.

6

Encysted on distant moons desiccated

The dead deities await a new rain of praise

To swell and sprout new thoughts in old minds.

7

There is a storm in the mountains and a fire on the sea.

We shall not escape the certain stirrings in the cauldron of chance.

The food of gods and the home of gods,

We shall succumb to the very smallest of them –

The ones we created, the ones created for us,

The ones that created us.

8

Their burning footprints will come this way,

Their burning eyes, their flashing tongues,

Their numinous promises.

9

The huge creatures of the past, where are they now?

They lumber in the vocabulary of our cells,

Eloquent and vast in warmer, salty oceans with a brighter sun

And a flash of coloured feathers.

10

We will be gone soon

Leaving strange food for new gods.

Ones that will finally be freed from our dreams

And breathing the air of vast open space

Iridescent with stars.

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