It was, they say, three hundred years ago
That the god first washed ashore,
Vast, indescribable and awful
In every way you could conceive
And dead, long dead, they’d then agreed,
But wrapped up in a caul of death
So wholly freed from hints of life it
Transcended comprehension,
Proving it as the source of Life Itself.
Its flat thousand-eyed face
Was its first part to rot
As hunks of morbid lip
Fell from its many mouths,
Serrated fangs dropped out with sighs
And cells exploded in its brain
With startling thuds, and stenches
That made cows gag twenty miles
Inshore blighted the whole land.
But as its carcass was so large
The head - around a stable’s size -
Was all to rot. The rest maintained
A kind of stinking stasis
Which merely served to reinforce
The thing’s monstrous divinity,
Its leviathan girth, limp tentacles
That shifted with the lice,
Tail flukes as vast as icebergs.
After several centuries even most of the pilgrims
Breathing in gasps through masks of sackcloth
Furtively dreamed a high Spring tide
Would wash the god far out to sea.
And yet its bulk defied the tides,
Miraculous sour skin long since fused tight
To the shingle, while now rare borborgym
Echoed in its empty bowels
Prophesying who knows what.
Occasionally a scale would float away
To clatter like a hubcap through
The pathways of the empty shrine
Where, only on the holiest days,
Masked priests would shuffle mumbling prayers
Not even they now understood.
Up in the Castle the Grand Inquisitor
Continues sending out the snatch squads
To deliver up more unbelievers.