Most poems about lost greatness mourn it. Mike Stone's "In Genesis Time" does something stranger: it calls humans former gods and then admits that godhood was never very impressive. The opening, "We were all gods once / In genesis time, far far ago," sounds like a fairy tale. The doubled "far far" and the slightly wrong "ago" (we expect "long ago" or "far away") give it a childlike lilt. Yet the poem soon turns on the grandeur it has just offered.
The central idea is that human power is real but hollow, and that it ends. The gods in the poem are "Little gods, titanic gods. / Crippled gods and unbound gods," a run of opposites that makes godhood sound like a muddle of conditions rather than a rank. They are "Omnipotent in our capacity / To kill and create," yet "powerless to parry foil or kiss." The missing commas in that line are worth noticing. "Parry" and "foil" are both fencing words, and "foil" can also mean to thwart, so the line wavers between defending, frustrating and tenderness. The kiss is the surprise, because the poem seems to suggest that these gods can destroy and make but cannot manage the small, intimate acts. Then come two flat verdicts: "All too short is our immortality. / Too banal all our magic powers." Immortality that runs out is a contradiction, and magic called banal has already lost its spell.
Notice the tenses. The poem begins in the past ("were," "was our domain"), but those last verdicts are in the present ("is," "all our magic powers"). The reader cannot be sure when the godlike age ended or whether it is still going on. "Genesis time" may point to the dawn of humanity, or to childhood, when everything felt possible. Judging by the text, the poem leaves that open on purpose.
The setting is built from contrasts of height and depth. The gods' realm is "the other side of clouds," "Soft and wispy, shadowless." The last word matters. Without shadows there is no weight, no depth and no darkness, which is how a world without death might feel. Then the poem drops to a single isolated line, "Underneath our feet," and the mood changes. Below are "Dark rumors of other beings with powers / Both less and more than ours." These beings are only rumored, and they are not clearly better or worse than the gods, which unsettles any idea of a neat hierarchy. Their "bones lay like shipwrecks / On shores of time and desire." That simile is the poem's best image. It turns skeletons into wrecked vessels, so that time and desire become a coastline where every ambitious voyage ends.
The final stanza carries the poem's logic to its end. "Under the layers of dust and ash" suggests both an archaeological dig and the old burial phrase about dust and ashes. Into this scene crawl the maggots, and Stone makes the noun act as a verb: they "worm their ways into our hearts." They are "Unweaving the warp and woof of us," so a person becomes cloth and death becomes the slow pulling out of threads. What is left is "the dance / Of unremembered ghosts in stark moonlight." The ending answers the earlier "shadowless." Moonlight brings back shadow and contrast, and the dance is both graceful and bleak because nobody remembers who is dancing.
Formally, the poem is free verse. It has no regular rhyme or metre, and its energy comes from line length. Short, nearly aphoristic lines ("Underneath our feet," "Little gods, titanic gods.") sit between longer, more winding ones, and many stanzas are a single line. These gaps feel like pauses in a chant or a dropped voice. Sound still matters: the hushed "Soft and wispy, shadowless" gives way to the clipped, grim "Maggots worm," and the archaic "naught" and "Til" give the ending a slightly old, ritual weight.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses both pride and self-pity. It lets humans claim enormous power and then shows that the power was ordinary, brief and unable to do the tender things. Its closing picture of forgotten ghosts in the moonlight suggests that the real loss is being remembered at all.