In this final poem of the "Zukala Cycle", REH shows us Zukala wandering amidst humanity in disguise. In this he resembles gods like Zeus, Odin and Dionysus. When Zukala takes his leman back to his realm, it is much like Hades and Persephone, only Persephone never had the stars at her feet. As I've said about the other poems in this cycle, these verses read best (IMO) as songs composed by an irreverent poet. I could see Ridondo singing this in front of Kull's palace.
This is certain: at one point in his literary life, Robert E. Howard was basically obsessed with Zukala. He never wrote four poems
about Attila, for instance. Or Ragnar Lodbrok. Or Odin. REH's good friend, Tevis Clyde Smith, once compared
Howard himself to Zukala in a cryptic comment. The two
must have had one or more conversations about REH's fictional (and basically unknown) deity. A pity no one asked TCS about that mysterious observation.
ZUKALA’S LOVE SONG Along the sky my chariot ran,
And the star-things ran before.
I raced the breeze over star-lit seas
Till the very wind gave o’er;
But my soul grew lone, and my heart grew sad,
Sad as the sighing sea,
For there was never a girl or lad
To laugh in the skies with me.
I hid my wings in a scarlet cloak,
I lowered my burning eyes,
And I went on foot with a lilting lute,
A beggar from the skies.
I tuned my lute to a song of love,
I edged my song with mirth,
And my feet drank deep of the waving grove
And deep of the dust of earth.
And maidens flung me silver coins,
And women praised my voice,
And when dawn was past, I found at last
The rose-white girl of my choice.
She flung me a rose when I sang to her,
And its roots sank in my breast;
But oh, she flung me a deathly rose
When she put my love to jest.
I sang her songs like a dew drop’s fall
And songs like a bugle peal;
But her heart was cold, and the world grew old,
And the heart of me turned to steel.
I rent to shreds my scarlet cloak,
I raised my terrible eyes,
I spread my wings till they hid the sun,
And mounted again to the skies.
I left my scarlet cloak to lie
Like a rift of blood on the sward,
But I did not break the lute I bore,
For that was the soul of a bard.
Then from the blue empirean deeps
Where Nothing conquers All,
I raised a hand to the tiny world
As a giant grasps a ball;
And I seized the woman that I loved,
She screamed in my embrace;
And I brought her to me, white and still
From the fear of that rush through space.
She lay in the hollow of my hand
And shrieked to hear the truth:
That I who laughed to see her writhe
Was one with the beggar youth.
Then into the bowl I flung her soul,
And the stars in glittering dress
Laughed, crowding in with their cosmic sin,
To jeer at her nakedness;
For the golden plates that hid her breasts
And the silk that covered her loins
I rent and flung to the trailing mist
As a drunkard scatters coins.
Blue and dim on the topaz rim
Where the silence drinks the night,
Forgotten moons like crazy loons
Hovered into her sight;
And out of the deep where shadows sleep
That never knew the sun,
Strange eyes aflame, the dark stars came,
Whispering, one by one.
And with burning eyes that hid her thighs
As fire-flies cover a tree,
They kissed her face in a hot embrace,
And she whimpered upon her knee.
Then I swept the band with a jade-nailed hand,
And the slim of her waist I gripped,
And the stars fell out of her hair like moths
And through my fingers slipped.
High on a lone sapphirean throne
I sat me down with a laugh,
And in wild alarm she clung to my arm,
In fear she clutched at my staff.
A million miles beneath her seat
Rippled the topaz seas,
And there were stars below her feet
And moons between her knees.