Mount of the Pagan God

A Poem

Illustration created by Midjourney

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Mount of the Pagan God

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As we pitched our tents on the terraced slopes
of the mount of the pagan god,
only half remained of the men who came; 
and a mage with a golden rod.

Round the camp were the graves of a hundred 
men of a tribe that had come before.
And we said, “How queer that no bones appear
but a kite’s on a tomb’s cracked floor.”

We peered down the shafts and we dug through the
dirt, but we found neither corpse nor clue.
But the wizard bit a shard of a jar of nard
And proclaimed that the witch spoke true:

“For she said that the souls of the ones who 
die in their quest for the cloud-veiled peak
Are the souls of the sought who’ll be found in time
by the souls of the ones who seek.”

So we broke up our camp by the light of 
dawn on the mount of the pagan god;
And we pressed by degrees through the mist-clad 
trees, ever up thru the steeps we trod

till we came to a pass ’neath the mountain’s peak
now veiled in a black cloud wide.
But our way was embarrassed by a hundred souls,
who had sought what we sought and died.

“We have found what we sought,” said the ghostly
chief of that eerie elemental band.
“They have died in their quest for the mountain’s peak.
Hear their howls fill the haunted land!”

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