Across the Hilltops Danced

“The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.” - Emerson
 
What fairy feet across the hilltop danced
before the Christ and first Mohammedans arrived
to render all these stones a blasted heresy?
We lean our picnic on the moss and eat
our sandwiches, removed from fear of blasphemy
to talk and think on Mother Nature’s gifts, the seat
of what may once have been a grand temple.
 
The children run towards the ancient lake
on which a royal barge may have lilted,
the raiments gilded by a cyclop’s eye
that now attends the locks on each young head.
I ask our host of sacrifice, he takes a sip of tea.
We were just blades of grass back then, he says,
a single mind and union, a froth upon the sea.