If poetry from mead springs
Full formed, then beer brings
Prose on a bubbling tide;
Afterbirth, in rivulets spread'd backside.
All subsequent middling rhymes
Penny dreadful, banal, literary crimes
From a single potion imbibe'd
God, made man, made sin besides.
Otherir, the mead of Lords
Teaches timetest ways to quiet hordes.
Golden drams which gild the tongue,
And borne of breath from Odin's lung
Bloomed flowers of wondrous yearn
Let mortals scribe before the wyrm's turn,
Draught deep of that once learned
Which cannot be earthly earned.
A giant in a mountain hall
descried below the landward sprawl
And all that went, all that is
From his perch, by measure, was his.
Odin scaled the eyrie steep;
Of the studded chalice, the God King deep
Drank his sorrows and all of men;
While giant slept, across the fen
He stole away, making verily free
With pilfered unmortal sorcery.
Dust wrought the human form;
A rarest seed from till'd dirt borne.
Stark blue skies where latent forked
Jagged lightning, fragrant libations corked,
Folios bright daubed rarest hued;
A sanded stone with spells imbued,
A word or phrase doubly whet,
On pilgrim's page with ink was set,
In spidry lines mad as webs,
And the tireless sigh of the sea's great ebbs.
From giant to immortal given
A city great, through fells riven,
Pass'd to men the bardic skill
And with it wont of worldly till.
A story told a thousand times,
Since ancient ages forgotten rhymes
Of Homer, Anaeus, a golden wheel,
Their empires built on folded steel.
Though not with word alone was made
That kingdom ruled by eager blade,
For men of words with notched, blotched quills
Wrote artfully of those they killed
And made myth of conquest, leaving out
All brutal tasks, those sacked redoubts.
