For the Old Pagan Gods

you can tell me life was dangerous back then
and in those stories was
the gamut of loathing, violence, and fear,
the world expressed in spider’s webs
and men to fauna turned by wicked nymphs
and heifers once bewailed girls

but in caprice and madness there’s
a certain honesty, no sense that man
is ever saved or needs to live out on their knees
before a crude symbol,

it’s all just grass and rock and swirling mystery