The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets - The Poet's Press

POETICA LOVECRAFTIANA
MAKER OF MONSTERS, MAKER OF GODS
Birthday Verses for Frank Belknap Long
How cold the sphere where all the gods are dead,
How grim the prospect when the end seems near!
How few deny the soul in age’s bed,
Not brave enough to risk another year
Outside the soothing balm of Paradise.
Yet who, I ask, brings you this message bright —
God’s hooded broker or a devil wise
In promise, slavering to steal the light
Of your assumèd immortality?
Beware these masked intruders, all of them!
God’s hall and Satan’s hot locality
Are only a sly imposter’s stratagem.
O poet good and gray, have courage still.
It matters not that gods retire or sleep.
We are their makers, who fashion or kill
as suits us, the gods of the air or deep.
No matter that your hand some days is frail.
That hand has summoned monsters and entwined
The earth’s sublimest beauties in a tale.
No matter that the falling years unwind
The scroll or turn the pages dry and sère.
Poe’s Bells and Gotham’s storied steeples seize
Your spirit, soaring from Providence to here —
To ancient barks adrift Aegean breeze —
To Mars — to plains where gods and heroes dwell —
To charnel pit where ghoul contends with rat —
To limelit stage where vampire victims swell
Their last aortal ebb into a bat-
Deep hunger’s all-consuming rage of red —
To aliens serene at crystalline gates —
Robots implacable — and demons dead
Until some stumbling fool reanimates
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