I. First Came the Word

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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.

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