Tales of the Cradle: Mother Deerest

Twice upon a map

The Lesser being took its cradle

And rocking, pushing, flipped it upside down

The world cried and laughed and toppled with glee,

Water falling free, rippling sickly sweet,

Tender tendrils reach and weep,

Finding themselves suspended.

No, no, no!

It echoed

Searching for its halved bright-ball,

Partly lost and shocked and gnawed,

Swiftly, it had fallen, into a cliffish sky or sea,

As neither made sense to our Lesser fellow as it be,

Neither it could touch, and neither seemed to see

How their shifting blues had stolen its clemency,

A crowned guardian sees from further away,

Striped in papyrus, unchanged and unnamed by the new-world antics,

Matronly and patiently,

With a feeling for the end, they must wait.

To destroy and create is fine,

But the start, child-light and this world’s new birth,

Equal promise and danger lurk

To let it consume all would be no good

So the being watches and waits

As any deer mother would,

For the time will come,

When the cradle must crash, and

The Lesser must drown,

Swimming with stars in their land.

The time still passes,

But the Lesser does not grow,

It is stuck searching for its toy-moon,

Lost so long ago,

Its rebirthed world is left alone,

But no world can live with a deity dethroned

So the tentacles grasp, and the chart outgrows

The paper given as a home.

Even still the crowned-thing waits,

And waits again for it to change.

Then come clouds, with their lofty highs,

Smoke and fire burn their eyes,

Some stranger sings into the madness,

And dust stirs up,

Beating the pillars into blackness.

The guardian sighs, and claws its calves.

There remains a glitter in the celestial bath.

It bares its throat, and calls upon the Lesser

Who refuses to come, so the being enters,

It calls the night and dark and murders the storm,

No clouds to come, no fire to warm,

It rips the charts and steals its ink,

Flooding the cradle, the godly bed sinks,

Until the waters are black

Every void turns red,

When the Lesser itself twists its head,

No longer a child,

No longer bright-life power it holds,

In cold empty hands,

Its world is no more

The Greater being has done all

As it knows it would have done most.

And it waits for the world to dry,

And the next Other to be lost,

And amidst the red, and the black and the little blue,

It sees a moon in the primordial stew.