The Medusa Of The Skies

    Haggard as if resurgent from a tomb,
    The moon uprears her ghastly, shrunken head,
    Crowned with such light as flares upon the dead
    From pallid skies more death-like than the gloom.
    Now fall her beams till slope and plain assume
    The whiteness of a land whence life is fled;
    And shadows that a sepulcher might shed
    Move livid as the stealthy hands of doom.

    O'er rigid hills and valleys locked and mute,
    A pallor steals as of a world made still
    When Death, that erst had crept, stands absolute -
        An earth now frozen fast by power of eyes
    That malefice and purposed silence fill,
        The gaze of that Medusa of the skies.

Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer and poet, best known for his contributions to the genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. He was a member of the Lovecraft Circle, a group of writers around H.P. Lovecraft. Smith's work was characterized by rich, fantastical imagery and vocabulary. He is considered one of the major writers of weird fiction and a key figure in early American speculative fiction.

Clark Ashton Smith

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English

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Medusa

    As drear and barren as the glooms of Death,
    It lies, a windless land of livid dawns,
    Nude to a desolate firmament, with hills
    That seem the fleshless earth's outjutting ribs,
    And plains whose face is crossed and rivelled deep
    With gullies twisting like a serpent's track.
    The leprous touch of Death is on its stones,
    Where for his token visible, the Head
    Is throned upon a heap of monstrous rocks,
    Grotesque in everlasting ugliness,
    Within a hill-ravine, that splits athwart
    Like some old, hideous and unhealing scar.
    Her lethal beauty crowned with twining snakes
    That mingle with her hair, the Gorgon reigns.
    Her eyes are clouds wherein Death's lightnings lurk,
    Yet, even as men that seek the glance of Life,

Clark Ashton Smith

A Dead City

    The twilight reigns above the fallen noon
    Within an ancient land, whose after-time
    Lies like a shadow o'er its ruined prime.
    Like rising mist the night increases soon
    Round shattered palaces, ere yet the moon
    On mute, unsentried walls and turrets climb,
    And touch with whiteness of sepulchral rime
    The desert where a city's bones are strewn.

    She comes at last; unburied, thick, they show
    In all the hoary nakedness of stone.
        From out a shadow like the lips of Death
    Issues a wind, that through the stillness blown,
        Cries like a prophet's ghost with wailing breath
    The weirds of finished and forgotten woe.

Clark Ashton Smith

White Death

    Methought the world was bound with final frost;
    The sun, made hueless as with fear and awe,
    Illumined yet the lands it could not thaw.
    Then on my road, with instant evening crost,
    Death stood, and in its shadowy films enwound,
    Mine eyes forgot the light, until I came
    Where poured the inseparate, unshadowed flame
    Of phantom suns in self-irradiance drowned.

    Death lay revealed in all its haggardness -
    Immitigable wastes horizonless;
    Profundities that held nor bar nor veil;
    All hues wherewith the suns and worlds were dyed
    In light invariable nullified;
    All darkness rendered shelterless and pale.

Clark Ashton Smith

Lament Of The Stars

    One tone is mute within the starry singing,
    The unison fulfilled, complete before;
    One chord within the music sounds no more,
    And from the stir of flames forever winging
    The pinions of our sister, motionless
    In pits of indefinable duress,
    Are fallen beyond all recovery
    By exultation of the flying dance,
    Or rhythms holding as with sleep or trance
    The maze of stars that only death may free -
    Flung through the void's expanse.

    In gulfs depressed nor in the gulfs exalted
    Shall shade nor lightening of her flame be found;
    In space that litten orbits gird around,
    Nor in the bottomless abyss unvaulted
    Of unenvironed, all-outlying night.
    Allotted gyre nor lawless comet-flight
    Shall find, ...

Clark Ashton Smith

The Unrevealed

    How dense the glooms of Death, impervious
    To aught of old memorial light! How strait
    The sunless road, suspended, separate,
    That leads to later birth! Untremulous
    With any secret morn of stars, to us
    The Past is closed as with division great
    Of planet-girdling seas - unknown its gate,
    Beyond the mouths of shadows cavernous.

    Oh! may it be that Death in kindness strips
    The soul of memory's raiment, rendering blind
        Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal,
    As when on mountain peaks a glance behind
    Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips
        Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall?

Clark Ashton Smith

Finis

    It seemed that from the west
    The live red flame of sunset,
    Eating the dead blue sky
    And cold insensate peaks,
    Was loosened slowly, and fell.
    Above it, a few red stars
    Burned down like low candle-flames
    Into the gaunt black sockets
    Of the chill insensible mountains.
    But in the ascendant skies
    (Cloudless, like some vast corpse
    Unfeatured, cerementless)
    Succeeded nor star nor planet.
    It may have been that black,
    Pulseless, dead stars arose
    And crossed as of old the heavens.
    But came no living orb,
    Nor comet seeming the ghost,
    Homeless, of an outcast world,
    Seeking its former place
    That is no more nor shall be
    In all the Cosmos again.
    Null, bla...

Clark Ashton Smith