In the year that men killed the gods,
no spring came;

men had lifted up the bones of the earth,
not creations of heat and metal,
steel pounded out on an anvil
by the strength of a man’s arm,
tempered by skill—
just simple stones.

They’d shaped them into weapons
that could kill that which
couldn’t be slain—
used the very fabric of the world
against the gods,
stoning them to death:
they were lapidated,
dead by a thousand slender papercuts
of disbelief.

Since the war ended,
the new rulers decreed that the gods
had never meant anything;
that if they could be killed,
then they couldn’t have been gods at all—
that they’d never been anything more
than frauds.

Anyone who questioned the new dogma
quickly and quietly disappeared.
Their blood joined the gods’,
poured out on the stone.

Now the farmers furrowed the earth
with steel plowshares,
turning up stones and nothing more;
they sowed the fields,
let the stallions cover the mares,
and waited.

But nothing bloomed, nothing swelled,
and no life quickened—
their wives miscarried,
the ewes were barren,
and the cows gave no more milk.

Nature, desecrated,
refused to yield more than bone;
the soil, saturated with the blood
of the divine, lay dead,
no friendly demiurge available
to bring life to the earth—
and soon, the people starved.

Rising in revolution,
they took the same stones
that had slain the gods,
and executed the men
who’d done the deed.

But the earth was not sated with their blood,
any more than humans had been satisfied
with the blood of the gods;
as they had taken more and more,
so too would nature—
until, perhaps
the gods were reborn.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation by Faye Gabriel, in memory of her sister, Grace, during our annual Fund Drive.]