Mike Stone imagines humanity as a race of former gods, living in a mythic "genesis time" long ago. The speaker describes us as both grand and flawed: little and titanic, crippled and unbound, able to kill and create yet helpless at the small, tender things, like parrying a blow or giving a kiss. Our power is real but oddly ordinary, and our immortality is "all too short."
Halfway through, the poem turns downward. Beneath the soft, shadowless clouds that were once our realm, the speaker senses older or stranger beings, whose bones lie like shipwrecks on the shore of "time and desire." Then comes decay: maggots work into our hearts and unpick us thread by thread until only ghosts remain, dancing in moonlight.
The mood is elegiac and unsettling. The speaker seems to feel a quiet, resigned grief for lost greatness, mixed with a cold awareness that everything, godlike or not, ends in dust.