“Beads of rain on blade of grass…
clouds the sun breaks through.”
Ten thousand years in our past!
By David Edwards
Bloated sun swells bloody red
Sanguine sunset for the human race
Writing final myths of a dying race
To replace those forgotten millennia ago
By DJ Tyrer
Beyond Nychthemeron
By Harris Coverley
The world be gone, and I am dead
The seas are dry and air is black
Reflecting feelings that you lack
Forever filling you with dread
Originally published at Quatrain.Fish (December 2018)
Vale of the Petty Mages
By Cardinal Cox
Far from forests where deodands dwell
Bloated cherry sun glimmered
Thinly into shadow-dense valley
Low wizards in mean towers
Envious of each other’s slight talents
Cast spells to make legs of furniture
Become uneven in length – utter curses
To warp doors – turn hinges rusty
Divine sigils that make drinking
Vessels become chipped – crack crockery
Neighbouring tribes ignore this place
And the annoyance it engenders
Last Swordsman
By DJ Tyrer
Last swordsman on Earth
Swings arcane vibroblade
To decapitate metallic men of elder age
Writing one last legend
Before the sun goes down
One final time
Sitchin Quatrain No. 6: Change Is Good
By Juan Perez
2019/20 Poet Laureate for Corpus Christi
we will survive, this measly human race
creating life on yet another world
willingly accepting that we must change
as parasite in a new world of worms
Shadows of Zothique
By Harris Coverley
“The night grows whole again….The shadows rest,
Gathered beneath a greater shadow’s wings.”
— Clark Ashton Smith, The Eldritch Dark
Dreams that come from future far flung
That make a man feel so unique
Feelings of guilt that one has sprung
That one could dare to glimpse Zothique!
Each new land a graveyard of gods
Ruled by some necromancing freak
Or torturers who hail the rod—
Those which await men in Zothique
From Naat across to distant Tosk
Eidolons yet to be antique
Accomplishments forever lost
Barbarity’s gasp in Zothique
Littered by man’s former glory
Eternal darkness forward creeps
Humans the forgotten story
My bones be dust before Zothique
Samnath the Incautious
By Cardinal Cox
Built chronoscopes for wizards to peep
Upon the inventions of earlier ages
Unearthly intelligent energy beings
Who invaded during an unknown Aeon
Rode their wavelengths into the final age
Usurping unsuspecting mages’ minds
Divined locations of lost treasures
Wealth buried in turbulent times
Jewels – coins (bearing forgotten tyrants) – ingots
Positions of the pits they’d been
Consigned to revealed by shadowy sprites
But not that they’d all been found centuries past
Commissioned construction of a multi-legged chariot
It outran the harnessed beasts between its shafts
Their chaffed corpses colliding against other
Transports – spilling bones – sinews
Exhausted flesh across eroded
Crown-stamped cobbles of imperial highway
Carnelian sun shone weak upon
His last adventure – few faint stars
Flickered in the twilight times
Servants sensed a sad sound
Saw a low light – found his
Forlorn form – burnt all his books
Sitchin Quatrain No. 5: The Cycle
By Juan Perez
2019/20 Poet Laureate for Corpus Christi
from a distant future, a different world
our forefathers first arrived at Nazca
migrating through the refreshed lands of earth
those troubled descendants yet to be born
View From Atlantis 