My Father's Crown

We fashion ourselves into gods;
  Ourselves, our fathers, our father’s fathers.
We take our infant sons,
  We mold them into ourselves.
We stand atop a timeless mountain,
  Perched upon its stony pinnacle,
  Our fathers and ourselves.
We command our sons to achieve the impossible,
  To scale that sheer cliff.
  But they cannot.
Then, as our sons grow
  We hold out a crown,
  An enduring legacy
  That we ourselves have never worn.
When they were small and new to the world,
  We allowed that gilded gold
  To lightly brush the soft down of their perfect heads.
We regaled them with tales of our past,
  Of fables that rival any of the ancient world,
  Having fashioned ourselves into gods.
But as they grow
  The distance between us and them,
  Between crown and crown,
  Grows as well.
We forget their perfection.
They reach in vain
  For that crown we have taught them to covet.
But fashioned in our own image,
  They are forever lacking.
And so they rebel
  And cast off the crown of their fathers.
When they do,
Our sons are then happy as themselves.
They are content in not sitting on that stony seat
  With the gods of their fathers.
Yet in time our sons have their own sons,
  And fashioned in our own image
  Our sons take their places beside us upon the pinnacle,
  And we pass the crown that we ourselves never wore.
So they sit there beside us,
Grim gods of old;
Our own sons fashioned in our own image,
  Knowing that after the generation after the next
  They will be a faint memory,
  A wisp of smoke curling away in the evening light.
Having been fashioned in our image
  They hold out that same crown,
  An enduring legacy
  That their own sons will strive and rebel against.
All over again.
We fashion ourselves into the gods that we never were,
  And that is our folly.