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Published in The Cross Plainsman, 2004.
I am the spur
That rides men’s souls,
The glittering lure
That leads around the world.
Published in The Grim Land and Others, 1976.
Dusk on the sea; the fading twilight shifts’
The night wind bears the ocean’s whisper dim—
Wind, on your bosom many a phantom drifts—
A silver star climbs up the blue world rim.
Wind, make the green leaves dance above me here
And idly swing my silken hammock—so;
Now, on that glimmering molten silver mere
Send the long ripples wavering to and fro.
And let your moon-white tresses touch my face
And let me know your slim-armed, cool embrace
While to my dreamy soul you whisper low.
Dream—aye, I’ve dreamed since last night left her tower
And now again she comes on star-soled feet.
Welcome, old friend; here in this rose-gemmed bower
I’ve drowsed away your Sultan’s golden heat.
Here in my hammock, Time I’ve dreamed away
For I have but to stretch a hand out, lo,
I’m treading langurous shores of Yesterday,
Moon-silvered deserts or the star-weird snow;
I float o’er seas where ships are purple shells,
I hear the tinkle of the camel bells
That waft down Cairo’s streets when dawn winds blow.
South Seas! I watch when dusky twilight comes
Making vague gods of ancient, sea-set trees.
The world path beckons—loud the mystic drums—
Here at my hand the magic golden keys
That fit the doors of Romance, Wonder, strange
Dim gossamer adventures; seas and stars.
Why, I have roamed the far Moon Mountain range
When sunset minted gold in shimmering bars.
All eager eyed I’ve sailed from ports of Spain
And watched the flashing topaz of the Main
When dawn was flinging witch fire on the spars.
I am content in dreams to roam my fill
The vagrant, drifting sport of wind and tide,
Slave of the greater freedom, venture’s thrill;
Here every magic ship on which I ride.
Gold, green, blue, red, a priceless treasure trove,
More wealth than ever pirate dared to dream.
My hammock swings—about the world I rove.
The sunset’s dusk, the dawning’s glide and gleam,
Moon-dappled leaves are murmuring in the wind
Which whispers tales. Lo, Tyre is just behind,
Through seas of dawn I sail, Romance abeam.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
For days they ringed us with the flame
For days their swarming soldiers came
The battle wrack was gory
We perished in the smoke and flame,
To give the world their traitor shame
And our undying glory
Published in The Phantagraph, Vol. 4, No. 5 (August 1936).
Riding down the road at evening with the stars or steed and shoon
I have heard an old man singing underneath a copper moon;
“God, who gemmed with topaz twilights, opal portals of the day,
“On our amaranthine mountains, why make human souls of clay?
“For I rode the moon-mare’s horses in the glory of my youth,
“Wrestled with the hills at sunset—till I met brass-tinctured Truth.
“Till I saw the temples topple, till I saw the idols reel,
“Till my brain had turned to iron, and my heart had turned to steel.
“Satan, Satan, brother Satan, fill my soul with frozen fire;
“Feed with hearts of rose-white women ashes of my dead desire.
“For my road runs out in thistles and my dreams have turned to dust.
“And my pinions fade and falter to the raven wings of rust.
“Truth has smitten me with arrows and her hand is in my hair—
“Youth, she hides in yonder mountains—go and see her, if you dare!
“Work your magic, brother Satan, fill my brain with fiery spells.
“Satan, Satan, brother Satan, have known your fiercest Hells.”
Riding down the road at evening when the wind was on the sea,
I have heard an old man singing, and he sang most drearily
Strange to hear, when dark lakes shimmer to the wailing of the loon,
Amethystine Homer singing under evening’s copper moon.
Published in The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 2: 1930-1932, October 2007.
Build me a gibbet against the sky,
Solid and strong and long miles high,
Let me hang where the high winds blow
That never stoop to the world below,
And the great clouds lumber by.
Let the people who toil below
See me swaying to and fro,
See me swinging the aeons through,
A dancing dot in the distant blue.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
Sing of my ancestors!
Sing of them with pride!
Sing of fair America,
Green prairies and blue tide!
One was born in County Cork!
Hail the shamrock green!
(One was named Abraham
Simeon Levine.)
One held rule in Dundee,
Friend of the Montrose.
(One sold nuts and apples
Where the river Tiber flows.)
One drank ale in Devonshire,
One scaled Lomond’s crags.
(One grew up in Warsaw
And peddled clothes and rags.)
One sailed out from Liverpool,
Bold and free and glad.
(One lended cash at high
Rates in Petrograd.)
Och, oi, oi, and hoot mon!
Gott sie dank go bragh!
Gevald! Be dommed! Diavoli!
America iss braw!
Shure, its meself thot loves the land,
Vy shouldn’t I? Oi oi!
Some fellow he no lika diss,
I’m nae you kind o’ boy!
Its aiche mon for his ain, py hell!
A feller got to stand
An’ tella people who he iss
And brag on his own land!
Vun nation unt vun langvitche!
Oi! And go for business fine
To Michael Israel Malcolmsky
Gammettio O’Stein.
Published in The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1: 1923-1929, June 2007.
The autumn sun was gettin’ low, the day was mighty windy,
When Hiram shot the hired man that kissed his girl Dorindy.
Them two was in the orchard there,
for apples birds was peckin’
When old man Hiram hove in view
and busted up their neckin’.
The hired man he took it out across the fields and ditches
But Hiram drawed a perfect bead
and shot him in the breeches.
The hired man he flagged it on, for he knew other ladies—
But Robert Frost can write the rest, or he can go to Hades.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
There breaks in the bazaar of Zanzibar,
red surge of life on life;
At eve there came through the sunset’s flame
a man with a dripping knife.
“Eunuchs a score and seven more
I’ve made today,” said he,
“The blood and tears of all my years
I’ve caused would fill a sea.
“Search far, search far from Zanzibar
for youths of many lands
“For my hungry steel and the glee I feel
when they writhe beneath my hand.”
He laid him down where the stains lay brown
on the floor of the gelding room,
And his gory blade as it down was laid
clanged like a tone of doom.
In sleep he leered and clawed his beard
with fingers black with gore;
The ghosts of dead men came from Hell
and staked him to the floor.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 21, No. 4 (April 1933). Alternative titles: A Dream of Autumn; The Autumn of the World.
Now is the lyre of Homer flecked with rust,
And yellow leaves are blown across the world,
And naked trees that shake at every gust
Stand gaunt against the clouds autumnal-curled.
Now from the hollow moaning of the sea
The dreary birds against the sunset fly,
And drifting down the sad wind’s ghostly dree
A breath of music echoes with a sigh.
The barren branch shakes down the withered fruit,
The seas faint footprints on the strand erase;
The sere leaves fall on a forgotten lute,
And autumn’s arms enfold a dying race.
Published in The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 2: 1930-1932, October 2007.
On my hands and knees in a scarlet pool
I heard the referee toll,
And the crowd roared: “Kill the yellow bum!”
Like the sea along a shoal.
I sprang, I struck, I crushed his skull
With a sudden desperate swing,
He died with his eyes to the glaring lights
And his back to the canvassed ring.
The refereee counted above the dead,
I swayed and clung to the ropes,
And the crowd roared: “Yellow! Both of em’s bums!”
Like the seas on the beaches slopes.
Published in The Fantasy Fan, Vol. 2, No. 5 (#17, January 1935).
Now in the gloom the pulsing drums repeat,
And all the night is filled with evil sound;
I hear the throbbing on inhuman feet
On marble stairs that silence locks around.
I see black temples loom against the night,
With tentacles like serpents writhed afar,
And waving in a dusky dragon light
Great moths whose wings unholy tapers char.
Red memory on memory, tier on tier,
Builds up a tower, time and space to span;
Through world on world I rise, and sphere on sphere,
To star-shot gulfs of lunacy and fear—
Black screaming ages never dreamed by man.
Was this your plan, foul spawn of cosmic mire,
To freeze my soul to stone and icy fire,
To carve me in the moon that all mankind
May know its race is futile, weak and blind—
A horror-blasted statue in the sky,
That does not live and nevermore can die?
Published in Rhymes of Death, 1975. Alternative title: The Ballad of Bucksnort Roberts.
Buckshot Roberts was a Texas man;
(Blue smoke drifting from the pinyons on the hill.)
Exiled from the plains where his rugged life began
(Buzzards circling low over old Blazer Mill.)
On the floor of ’dobe, dying, he lay,
Holding thirteen men at bay.
Thirteen men of the desert’s best,
True-born sons of the stark Southwest.
Men from granite and iron hewed—
Riding the trail of the Lincoln feud.
Fighters of iron nerve and will—
But they saw John Middleton lying still
In the thick dust clotted dark and brown,
Where Roberts’ bullet cut him down;
So they crouched in cover, on belly or knee,
Warily firing from bush and tree.
Even Billy the Kid held hard his hate,
Waiting his chance as a wolf might wait,
His cold gaze fixed on the brooding Mill
Where the black muzzle gleamed on the window sill.
There on the floor Bill Roberts lay,
His life in a red stream ebbing away:
Weather beaten and gnarled and scarred,
Grown old in a land where life was hard,
Soldier, ranger and pioneer,
Rawhide son of the Last Frontier.
Indian forays and border wars
Had left their mark in his many scars.
He had coursed with Death—and the pace was fast:
But he knew he had reached the end at last.
Shot through and through and nearly done—
Close he huddled his buffalo gun,
Propped the barrel on the window sill—
The firing ceased, and the land was still.
They knew he had taken his mortal wound,
And they waited like silent wolves around,
All but Dick Brewer who led the band:
His fury burned him like a brand;
Reckless he rose in his savage ire,
Stood in the open to aim and fire.
Roberts laughed in a ghastly croak,
His finger crooked, and the old gun spoke.
Blue smoke spat, and the whistling lead
Tore off the top of Brewer’s head.
Roberts laughed, and the red tide welled
Up to his lips—the echoes belled
Clear and far—then faint and far,
Like a haunting call from a twilight star.
The gnarled hands slid from the worn old gun;
A lark flashed up in the golden sun;
A mountain breeze went quivering past—
So he came to the long trail’s end at last.
Buckshot Roberts was a Texas man
(Nightwinds sighing over Ruidosa way)—
Heart and blood and marrow of a fighting clan!
(So the Tularosa whispers in the dawning of the day.)
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 16, No. 3 (September 1930).
Trumpets triumph in red disaster,
White skulls litter the broken sod,
And we who ride for the one Black Master
Howl at the iron gates of God.
Temples rock and the singers falter,
Lights go out in the rushing gloom—
Slay the priests on this blackened altar,
Rip the babe from the woman’s womb!
Black be the night that locks around them,
They who chant of the Good and Light,
Black be the pinions that shall confound them,
Breaking their brains with a deadly fright.
Praised be the Prince that reigns forever
Throned in the shadows stark and grim,
Where cypress moans by the midnight river—
Lift your goblets and drink to him!
Virgins wail and a babe is whining
Nailed like a fly on a gory lance;
White on the skulls the stars are shining,
Over them sweeps our demon’s dance.
Trumpets bray and the stars are riven!
Shatter the altar, blot the light!
From the bursting hells to the fallen heaven
We are kings of the world tonight!
Published in Omniumgathum, 1976.
Let Saxons sing of Saxon kings,
Red faced swine with a greasy beard—
Through my songs the Gaelic broadsword sings,
The pibrock skirls and the sporran swings,
For mine is the blood of the Irish kings
That Saxon monarchs feared.
The heather bends to a marching tread,
The echoes shake to a marching tune—
For the Gael has supped on bitter bread,
And follows the ghosts of the mighty dead,
And the blue blades gleam and the pikes burn red
In the rising of the moon.
Norseman reaver or red haired Dane,
Norman baron or English lord—
Each of them reeled to a reddened rain,
Drunken with fury and blind with pain,
Till the black fire spilled from the Gaelic brain
And the steel from the broken sword.
But never the chiefs in death lay still,
Never the clans lay scattered and few—
But a new face rose and a new voice roared,
And a new hand gripped the broken sword,
And the fleeing clans were a charging horde,
And the old hate burned anew!
Brian Boruma, Shane O’Neill,
Art McMurrough and Edward Bruce,
Thomas Fitzgerald—ringing steel
Shakes the hills and the trumpets peal,
Skulls crunch under the iron heel!
Death is the only truce!
Clontarf, Benburb, and Yellow Ford—
The Gael with red Death rides alone!
Lamh derg abu! And the riders reel
To Hugh O’Donnell’s girding steel
And the lances of Tyrone!
Edward Fitzgerald, Charles Parnell,
Robert Emmet—I smite the harp!
Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy—hail!
The song that you sang shall never fail
While one brain burns with the fire of the Gael
And one last sword is sharp—
Lamh laidir abu! Lamh derg abu!
Munster and Ulster, north and south,
The old hate flickers and burns anew,
The heather shakes and the pikes gleam blue.
And the old clans charge as they charged with you
Into Death’s red grinning mouth!
We have not won and we have not lost—
Fire in Kerry and Fermanagh—
We have broken the teeth in the Saxon’s boast
Though our dead have littered each heath and coast,
And by God, we will raise another host!
Slainte—Erin go bragh.
Published in Amra, Vol. 2, No. 8 (November-December 1959). Originally untitled.
Now is a summer come out of the sea,
And the hills that were bare are green.
They shower the petals and the bee
On the valleys that laze between.
So it was in the dreaming past,
And life is a shifting maze,
Summer on summer fading fast,
In a mist of yesterdays.
Out of the East, the tang of smoke,
The flight of the startled deer,
A ringing axe the silence broke,
The tread of the pioneer.
Saxon eyes in a weathered face,
Cabins where trees had been,
Hard on the heels of a fading race,
But the hills were ancient then.
Up from the South a haze of dust,
The pack mules’ steady pace,
Armor tarnished and red with rust,
Stern eyes in a sun-bronzed face.
The mesquite mocked the flag of Spain,
That the wind flung out again,
The grass bent under the pack mule train—
But the hills were ancient then.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
I have a saintly voice, the people say;
With Elder Blank I send the music winging—
I smile and compliment him on his singing—
By God, I’d rather hear a jackass bray.
I nod and smile to all the pious sisters—
I wish their rears were stung with seven blisters.
That youthful minister, so straight and slim—
I’d trade my soul for one long night with him.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 13, No. 2 (February 1929).
The green waves wash above us
Who slumber in the bay
As washed the tide of ages
That swept our race away.
Our cities—dusty ruins;
Our galleys—deep-sea slime;
Our very ghosts, forgotten,
Bow to the sweep of Time.
Our land lies stark before it
As we to alien spears,
But, ah, the love we bore it
Outlasts the crawling years.
Ah, jeweled spires at even—
The lute’s soft golden sigh—
The Lion-Gates of Knossos
When dawn was in the sky.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 15, No. 1 (January 1930).
They hanged John Farrel in the dawn amid the market-place;
At dusk came Adam Brand to him and spat upon his face.
“Ho, neighbors all,” spake Adam Brand, “see ye John Farrel’s fate!
“ ’Tis proven here a hempen noose is stronger than man’s hate!
“For heard ye not John Farrel’s vow to be avenged on me
Come life or death? See how he hangs high on the gallows tree!”
Yet never a word the people spake, in fear and wild surprize—
For the grisly corpse raised up its head and stared with sightless eyes,
And with strange motions, slow and stiff, pointed at Adam Brand
And clambered down the gibbet tree, the noose within its hand.
With gaping mouth stood Adam Brand like a statue carved of stone,
Till the dead man laid a clammy hand hard on his shoulder-bone.
Then Adam shrieked like a soul in hell; the red blood left his face
And he reeled away in a drunken run through the screaming market-place;
And close behind, the dead man came with face like a mummy’s mask,
And the dead joints cracked and the stiff legs creaked with their unwanted task.
Men fled before the flying twain or shrank with bated breath,
And they saw on the face of Adam Brand the seal set there by death.
He reeled on buckling legs that failed, yet on and on he fled;
So through the shuddering market-place, the dying fled the dead.
At the riverside fell Adam Brand with a scream that rent the skies;
Across him fell John Farrel’s corpse, nor ever the twain did rise.
There was no wound on Adam Brand but his brow was cold and damp,
For the fear of death had blown out his life as a witch blows out a lamp.
His lips writhed in a horrid grin like a fiend’s on Satan’s coals,
And the men that looked on his face that day, his stare still haunts their souls.
Such was the fate of Adam Brand, a strange, unearthly fate;
For stronger than death or hempen noose are the fires of a dead man’s hate.
Published in Weirdbook Eight, 1973. Alternative title: The Tale the Dead Slaver Told.
Dim and grey was the silent sea,
Dim was the crescent moon;
From the jungle back of the shadowed lea
Came a tom-tom’s eerie croon
When we glutted the waves with a hundred slaves
From a Jekra barracoon.
Our way to bar, a man of war
Was sailing with canvas full;
So the doomed men up from the hold we bore,
Hacked them to pieces and hurled them o’er,
And we heard the grim sharks as they tore
The flesh from each sword-cleft skull.
Then fast we fled toward the rising sun
But we could not flee the dead
And ever behind our flying ship
Wavered a trail of red.
She sank like a stone off Calabar
With all of her bloody crew.
There was no breeze to shake a spar,
No reef her hull to hew.
But dusky hands rose out of the deep,
And dragged her under the blue.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
There is a cavern in the deep
Beyond the sea-winds brawl;
Where the hills of the sea slope high and steep,
And dragons sleep
And serpents creep
There is a cavern in the deep
Where strange sea-creatures crawl.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
I live in a world apart
A world that has no link with this drab earth.
A vague, melodious world, where breezes start
Soft joys and gay-hued mirth.
Published in The Poet’s Scroll, April 1929. Alternative title: King Alfred Rides Again. Compare The Harp of Alfred.
I marched with Alfred when he thundered forth
To break the crimson standards of the Dane;
I saw the galleys looming in the north
And heard the oar-locks and the sword’s refrain.
And far across the pleasant Wessex downs
The chanting of the spearmen broke the lyre,
Till where the black thorn forest grimly frowns
We sang a song of doom and steel and fire.
Death rode his pale horse through the dreaming sky
All through that long red summer afternoon,
And night and silence fell, when silently
The dead men lay beneath a cold white moon.
Now Alfred sleeps with all the swords of yore,
(But o’er the downs a brooding shadow glides)
Untrampled flowers dream along the shore,
And Guthrum’s galleys rust beneath the tides.
Now underneath this drowsy tree I lie
And turn old dreams upon my lazy knees,
Till ghostly giants fill the summer sky
And phantom oars awake the sleeping seas.
Published in Golden Atom, 20th Anniversary Issue (1959-60).
Silver bridge in a broken sky,
Golden fruit on a withered bough,
Red-lippped slaves that the ancients buy—
What are the dreams of Nineveh now?
Ghostly hoofs in the brooding night
Beat the bowl of the velvet stars.
Shadows of spears when the moon is white
Cross the sands with ebony bars.
But not the shadows that brood her fall
May check the sweep of the desert fire,
Nor a dead man lift up a crumbling wall,
Nor a spectre steady a falling spire.
Death fires rise in the desert sky
Where the armies of Sargon reeled;
And though her people still sell and buy,
Nineveh’s doom is set and sealed.
Silver mast with a silken sail,
Sapphire seas ’neath a purple prow,
Hawk-eyed tribes on the desert trail—
What are the dreams of Nineveh now?
Published in A Rhyme of Salem Town and Other Poems, 2002.
Who raps here on my door tonight,
Stirring my sleep with the deadened sound?
Here in my Room there is naught of light,
And silence locks me round.
The taste of the earth is in my mouth,
Stillness, decay and lack of light,
And dull as doom the rapping
Thuds on my Door tonight.
My Room is narrow and still and black,
In such have kings and beggars hid;
And falling clods are the knuckles
That rap on my coffin lid.
Published in The Howard Collector, Spring 1968 (as “The Dust Dance”).
The sin and jest of the times am I
Since destiny’s dance began,
When the weary gods from the dews and sods
Made me and named me man.
Ah, it’s little they knew when they molded me
For a pawn of their cosmic chess,
What a mummer wild, what an insane child
They fashioned from nothingness!
For I with the shape of my kin the ape
And the soul of a soaring hawk,
I fought my way from the jungles grey
Where the hunting creatures stalk.
I champ my tusks o’er beetles and husks,
I tear red meat for my feast;
The pulse of the earth is in my mirth
And the roar of the primal beast.
By a freak of fate through the whirling spate
Of the uncouth roaring years,
Red taloned I came from the tribal flame
And the trails beside the meres.
Back of my eyes a tiger lies,
Savage of claw and tooth;
Close at my heels the baboon steals
Barren of pity and ruth.
And, ah, I know as I bellow so
With my foolish bloody mirth,
That the soul of the tree is the soul of me
And things of the physical earth.
For I was made from the dust and the dew,
The dawns, the dusk and the rain,
The snow and the grass and when I pass
I’ll fade to the dust again.
For I know that all of the platitudes
That we hear from birth to youth
Slink from the backs of the brazen facts,
The reign of talon and tooth.
From the ghostly gleam of a vagrant dream,
From the shade of a wheeling bat,
From a passion-haunted vision told
In the huts where the women sat,
I wove the skein of a Hell aflame—
And it passed from breath to breath—
And paradise beyond the skies
Against the day of my death.
I roared my glee to the sullen sea
When Abel’s blood was shed;
My jeer was loud in the gory crowd
That stoned St. Stephen dead.
I laughed when Nero’s minions sent
Fire-tortured souls to the sky;
Without the walls of Pilate’s halls
I shouted “Crucify!”
Sin of Adam was brother to me,
My zeal is passion shod,
Bearing red brands in the heathen lands
To teach them the word of God.
Sages speak of my brother love,
No love, in truth, I lack
As I hang them free from the gallows tree
And shatter them on the rack.
Seek me not in the drawing rooms
For music and light are there,
And I cloak the lusts of my blood-red soul
With culture’s gossamer.
Look for me by the gibbet tree
Where a saintly hero dies,
And the jeer of each knave that he sought to save
Goes up to the naked skies.
Seek my face in a shadowy place
Where the evil torches gleam
And flesh with flesh in Satan’s mesh
Mingles in lurid dream.
Let sages speak, I know the reek
Of the battlefields of earth,
The musk of the jungle is in my breath,
The tiger roar in my mirth.
The brazen realities are mine
And I laugh at dreams and rime,
For I am a man of the primal years
And a laughing slave of Time.
Published in Magazine of Horror, November 1965.
The nightwinds tossed the tangled trees, the stars were cold with scorn;
Midnight lay over Dark Valley the hour I was born.
The mid-wife dozed beside the hearth, a hand the window tried—
She woke and stared and screamed and swooned at what she saw outside.
Her hair was white as a leper’s hand, she never spoke again;
But laughed and wove the wild flowers into an endless chain.
But when my childish tongue could speak, and my infant feet could stray,
I found her dying in the hills at the haunted dusk of day.
And her darkening eyes at last were sane; she passed with a fearsome word:
“You who were born in Dark Valley, beware the Valley’s lord!”
As I came down through Dark Valley, the grim hills gulped the light;
I heard the ponderous tramping of a monster in the night.
The great trees leaned together, the vines ensnared my feet,
I heard across the darkness my own heart’s thundering beat.
Damned be the dark ends of the earth where old horrors live again.
And monsters of lost ages lurk to eat the souls of men!
I climbed the ridge into the moon and trembling there I turned—
Down in the blasted shadows two eyes like hellfire burned.
Under the black malignant trees a shapeless Shadow fell—
I go no more to Dark Valley which is the Gate of Hell.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 12, No. 6 (December 1928).
How many weary centuries have flown
Since strange-eyed beings walked this ancient shore;
Hearing, as we, the green Pacific’s roar,
Hewing fantastic gods from sullen stone!
The sands are bare; the idols stand alone.
Impotent ’gainst the years was all their lore:
They are forgot in ages dim and hoar;
Yet still, as then, the long tide-surges drone.
What dreams had they, that shaped these uncouth things?
Before these gods what victims bled and died?
What purple galleys swept along the strand
That bore the tribute of what dim sea-kings?
But now they reign o’er a forgotten land,
Gazing forever out beyond the tide.
Published in The Gold and the Grey, 1974 (as “The Gold and the Grey”).
Shadows and echoes haunt my dreams
with dim and subtle pain,
With the faded fire of a lost desire,
like a ghost on a moonlit plain.
In the pallid mist of death-like sleep
she comes again to me:
I see the gleam of her golden hair
and her eyes like the deep grey sea.
We came from the North as the spume is blown
when the blue tide billows down;
The kings of the South were overthrown
in ruin of camp and town.
Shrine and temple we dashed to dust,
and roared in the dead gods’ ears;
We saw the fall of the kings of Gaul,
and shattered the Belgae spears.
And South we rolled like a drifting cloud,
like a wind that bends the grass,
But we smote in vain on the gates of Spain
for our own kin held the Pass.
Then again we turned where the watch-fires burned
to mark the lines of Rome,
And fire and tower and standard sank
as ships that die in foam.
The legions came, hard hawk-eyed men,
war-wise in march and fray,
But we rushed like a whirlwind on their lines
and swept their ranks away.
Army and consul we overthrew,
staining the trampled loam;
Horror and fear like a lifted spear
lay hard on the walls of Rome.
Our mad desire was a flying fire
that should burn the Appian Gate—
But our day of doom lay hard on us,
at a toss of the dice of Fate.
There rose a man in the ranks of Rome—
ill fall the cursed day!—
Our German allies bit the dust
and we turned hard at bay.
And the raven came and the lean grey wolf,
to follow the sword’s red play.
Over the land like a ghostly hand
the mists of morning lay,
We smote their horsemen in the fog
and hacked a bloody way.
We smote their horsemen in the cloud
and as the mists were cleared
Right through the legion massed behind
our headlong squadron sheared.
Saddle to saddle we chained our ranks
for naught of war we knew
But to charge in the wild old Celtic way—
and die or slash straight through.
We left red ruin in our wake,
dead men in ghastly ranks—
When fresh unwearied Roman arms
smote hard upon our flanks.
Baffled and weary, red with wounds,
leaguered on every side,
Chained to our doom we smote in vain,
slaughtered and sank and died.
Writhing among the horses’ hoofs,
torn and slashed and gored,
Gripping still with a bloody hand,
a notched and broken sword,
I heard the war-cry growing faint,
drowned by the trumpet’s call,
And the roar of “Marius! Marius!”
triumphant over all.
Through the bloody dust and the swirling fog
as I strove in vain to rise
I saw the last of the warriors fall,
and swift as a falcon flies
The Romans rush to the barricades
where the women watched the fight—
I heard the screams and I saw steel flash
and naked arms toss white.
The ravisher died as he gripped his prey,
by the dagger fiercely driven—
By the next stroke with her own hand
the heart of the girl was riven.
Brown fingers grasped white wrists in vain—
blood flecked the gasping loam—
The Cimbri yield no virgin-slaves
to glut the gods of Rome!
And I saw as I crawled like a crippled snake
to slay before I died,
Unruly golden hair that tossed
in wild and untamed pride.
Her slim foot pressed a dead man’s breast,
her proud head back was thrown,
Matching the steel she held on high,
her eyes in glory shone.
I saw the gleam of her golden hair
and her eyes like the deep grey sea—
And the love in the gaze that sought me out,
barbaric, fierce and free—
The the dagger fell
and the skies fell and the mists closed over me.
Like phantoms into the ages lost
has the Cimbrian nation passed;
Destiny shifts like summer clouds
on Grecian hill-tops massed.
Untold centuries glide away,
Marius long is dust;
Even eternal Rome has passed
in days of decay and rust.
But memories live in the ghosts of dreams,
and dreams still come to me,
And I see the gleam of her golden hair
and her eyes like the deep grey sea.
Published in Verses in Ebony, 1975.
I leave to paltry poets
The tabor and the lute;
I sing in drums and tom-toms
The black abysmal brute—
My voice is of the people,
That giant wild and mute.
(With blood of all the ages
His broken nails are black,
The whole world weights and burdens
His hairy bestial back;
He shambles down forever
A blind and tangled track.)
I bring no polished diamonds,
No gems from London town;
No cultured whim or fancy
My rugged verses crown;
You find here naught but power
That breaks a city down.
I spill no words of beauty,
Coins from a silver purse,
My hands are built of iron,
And iron is in my verse.
I bring no love but fury,
No blessing but a curse.
My low pitched brow is slanting,
My eyes are burning red,
With fierce black primal visions
That thunder in my head;
Behind my heart the rivers
And all the jungles spread.
I slaved in star-girt Babel
And labored at the wall;
I watched the birth of pavements
Beneath my slugging maul—
And in a frenzied dawning
I saw her towers fall.
I toiled in Tuscan vineyards,
I broke the beaten loam,
I strained against the mallet
That drove the chisel home;
I sweated in the galleys
That broke the road to Rome.
Oh, Khan and king and pharaoh!
In cold and drouth and heat
I bled to build your glory,
An ant beneath your feet—
But always rose a morning
When blood ran in the street.
The world upon my shoulders
Knee deep in muck and silt,
My hand beneath my tatters
Still grips the hidden hilt—
Who fed the ancient rivers
With blood rebellions spilt?
Published in The Poet’s Scroll, June 1929. Alternative title: Oh Babylon, Lost Babylon.
Bab-ilu’s women gazed upon our spears,
And roses flung, and sang to see us ride.
We built a glory for the marching years
And starred our throne with silver nails of pride.
Our horses’ hoofs were shod with brazen fears:
We laved our hands in blood and iron tears,
And laughed to hear how shackled kings had died.
Our chariots awoke the sleeping world;
The thunder of our hoofs the mountains broke;
Before our spears were empires’ banners furled
Amid death and doom and iron winds were hurled,
And slaughter rode before, and clouds and smoke—
Then in the desert lands the tribes awoke
And death and vengeance ’round our walls were whirled.
Oh Babylon, lost Babylon! Where now
The opal altar and the golden spire,
The tower and the legend and the lyre?
Oh, withered fruit upon a broken bough!
The sobbing desert winds still whisper how
The sapphire city of the gods’ desire
Fell in the smoke and crumbled in the fire;
And lizards bask upon her columns now.
Now poets sing her golden glory gone;
And Babylon has faded with the dawn.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
I am older than the world:
Older than life.
The race of man is a babe in the cradle of Time.
I am Alpha and Omega.
The first and the last;
The circle without end.
I am a serpent with its tail in its mouth;
I am a triangle whose tips overlap a circle.
I am the older sister of Destiny.
Before man was, I was:
And after man has vanished from the Universe, I will be.
Time is a phantom, built by the mind of man;
There is no Time.
The thing that men call Time flies before my wind;
Time has beginning, duration, ending.
I am that which was, is and shall be;
Unceasing, Neverending, Eternal.
Number all the sands of all the shores of all the worlds
Of all the Universes.
And let each sand represent a million centuries;
And they all shall not be a single instant
Of Eternity.
For I am numberless and unnumbered,
Eternity had no beginning nor shall there be ending.
I am Alpha and Omega.
That which was, is and shall be;
Numberless and unnumbered.
Published in The Daniel Baker Collegian, 15 March 1926, the newspaper of Daniel Baker College (Brownwood , Texas).
He was six foot four and wide as a door
And he weighed two hundred pounds
And he laughed as he spoke, “I’ll cool that bloke.
I’ll flatten him in two rounds.”
Ah, the crowd they cheered, but the crowd they jeered
When his foeman stepped in the ring;
They hissed and jowled and the giant scowled
And rushed with a round-house swing.
Yes, he came full tilt but the beans were spilt
For the smaller man timed him fair
And knocked him out with a left hand clout
And the crowd gave him the air.
So the moral is this: make your foeman miss
And never lead with your right,
But the first that you’re to do is be sure
That it’s not Jack Dempsey you fight.
Published in Singers in the Shadows, 1970.
The smile of a child was on her lips—oh, smile of a last long rest.
My arm went up and my arm went down and the dagger pierced her breast.
Silent she lay—oh still, oh still!—with the breast of her gown turned red.
Then fear rose up in my soul like death and I fled from the face of the dead.
The hangings rustled upon the walls, velvet and black they shook,
And I thought to see strange shadows flash from the dark of each door and nook.
Tapestries swayed on the ghostly walls as if in a wind that blew;
Yet never a breeze stole through the rooms and my black fear grew and grew.
Moonlight dappled the pallid sward as I climbed o’er the window sill;
I looked not back at the darkened house which lay so grim and still.
The trees reached phantom hands to me, their branches brushed my hair,
Footfalls whispered amid the grass, yet never a man was there.
The shades loomed black in the forest deeps, black as the doom of death;
Amid the whispers of shapes unseen I stole with bated breath,
Till I came at last to a ghostly mere bordered with silver sands;
A faint mist rose from its shimmering breast as I knelt to lave my hands.
The waters mirrored my haggard face, I bent close down to see—
Oh, Mother of God! A grinning skull leered up from the mere at me!
With a gibbering scream I rose and fled till I came to a mountain dim
And a great black crag in the blood-red moon loomed up like a gibbet grim.
Then down from the great red stars above, each like a misty plume,
There fell on my face long drops of blood and I knew at last my doom.
Then I turned me slow to the only trail that was left upon earth for me,
The trail that leads to the hangman’s cell and the grip of the gallows tree.
Published in The Poet’s Scroll, January 1929.
I carved a woman out of marble when
The walls of Athens echoed to my fame,
And in the myrtle crown was shrined my name.
I wrought with skill beyond all mortal ken.
And into cold inhuman beauty then
I breathed a touch of white and living flame—
And from her pedestal she rose and came
To snare the souls and rend the hearts of men.
Without a soul, without a human heart
She shattered mortal love and mortal pride
And even I fell victim to my art,
With bitter joyless love I took my bride.
And still with frozen hate that never dies
She sits and stares at me with icy eyes.
Published in Fantasy Crossroads, No. 3 (May 1975).
Bring aft the rum! Life’s measure’s overfull
And down the sides the splashing liquor slops
To mingle in the unknown seas of Doubt.
Bring aft the rum! The tide is going out;
The breeze has lain, the tattered mainsail drops
Against the mast. And on the battered hull
I hear the drowsy slap of lazy waves.
And through the port I see the sandy beach,
And sullen trees beyond, a swampland dank.
I’ve known the isles the furtherest tide surge laves—
Now like a stranded hulk I come to die
Beside a shore mud-foul and forest-rank.
Bring aft the rum! And set it just in reach.
I’ve sailed the seven seas, long, bloody years.
I’ve seen men die and ships go reeling down—
I might have robbed my fellow man in style
But I was long on force and short on guile—
So ’stead of trade I chose the buccaneers—
Rig aft a plank there, damn you! Sink or drown!—
Life is a vain, illusive, fickle thing—
Now nearly done with me—it could not hold
Allurement to allay my thirst—for rum.
Steps on the main companion? Let them come.
Here is the map; let Silver have the gold.
Gems, wenches, rum—aye, I have shed my fling.
I guzzled Life as I have guzzled rum.
Run up the sails—throw off the anchor chain—
The courses sway, the straining braces thrum,
The breezes lift, the scents of ocean come—
Bring aft the rum! I’ll put to sea again.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 14, No. 1 (July 1929).
There came to me a Shape one summer night
When all the world lay silent in the stars
And moonlight crossed my room with ghostly bars.
It whispered hints of weird unhallowed sight;
I followed, then in waves of spectral light
Mounted the shimmery ladders of my soul,
Where moon-pale spiders, huge as dragons, stole—
Great forms like moths with wings of whispy white.
Then round the world the sighing of the loon
Shook misty lakes beneath the false dawn’s gleams.
Rose-tinted shone the skyline’s minaret.
I rose in fear and then with blood and sweat
Beat out the iron fabrics of my dreams
And shaped of them a web to snare the moon.
Published in The Daniel Baker Collegian, May 1926, the newspaper of Daniel Baker College (Brownwood , Texas).
Time races on and none can stay the tread; Bridal bowers
Re-echo to the flight of bats. Their garland’d towers
Rear like gaunt spectres ’gainst the dawning’s red,
Veiled by the fogs of time the Slayer glowers.
Blithe Pan has passed and all the dryads fled.
We walk a dim defined and mystic vale,
The mountains vaguely loom on either hand,
Groping we go and often lose the trail,
Compassed by demon shapes of Shadowland.
On either hand we hear the breakers roar,
The shifting grey fogs close behind, before.
Mazed by the trail, and by the whole world plan,
Drudging and toiling, never knowing why,
The Cosmic Jester of the gods is man,
Philosophers are fools, priests jest and lie.
Nothing is real. Leaves fade and song-birds fly.
Bewildered still, our plodding ways we go,
The vagrant sport of all the winds that blow.
And after all this toilsome fume and fret—
What ocean lies beyond? I only know
This Universal stage is set.
The trail is placed and run that we must follow,
The Destin’d trail. ’Tis none of ours to choose,
The trail that only runs from night to night
From out the grey dawn’s cynic and mocking light
Into the smoldering sun-set’s crimson wallow.
I only know that though we win, we lose.
I only know that all conflict must cease,
That always after war, comes, somehow, peace.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 12, No. 1 (July 1928).
These are the gates of Nineveh; here
Sargon came when his wars were won,
Gazed at the turrets looming clear,
Boldly etched in the morning sun.
Down from his chariot Sargon came,
Tossed his helmet upon the sand,
Dropped his sword with its blade like flame,
Stroked his beard with his empty hand.
“Towers are flaunting their banners red,
The people greet me with song and mirth,
But a weird is on me,” Sargon said,
“And I see the end of the tribes of earth.
“Cities crumble, and chariots rust—
I see through a fog that is strange and gray—
All kingly things fade back to the dust,
Even the gates of Nineveh.”
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 32, No. 6 (December 1938).
The ghost kings are marching; the midnight knows their tread,
From the distant, stealthy planets of the dim, unstable dead;
There are whisperings on the night-winds and the shuddering stars have fled.
A ghostly trumpet echoes from a barren mountainhead;
Through the fen the wandering witch-lights gleam like phantom arrows sped;
There is silence in the valleys and the moon is rising red.
The ghost kings are marching down the ages’ dusty maze;
The unseen feet are tramping through the moonlight’s pallid haze,
Down the hollow clanging stairways of a million yesterdays.
The ghost kings are marching, where the vague moon-vapor creeps,
While the night-wind to their coming, like a thund’rous herald sweeps;
They are clad in ancient grandeur, but the world, unheeding, sleeps.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
Gods, what a handsome youth across the way.
What shall I do to make him notice me?
I must not be too obvious—there
I’ll shift my dress, demurely and let him see
A quick glance of an ankle very trim;
Then blush and smooth my skirts down hastily
As if ’twere unintentional—Hell!
The fool’s not even got his eyes on me.
Published in Always Comes Evening, 1957. Originally untitled.
Long ere Priapus pranced through groves Arcadian sunlight kissed
The gods of Easter Island were born out of the mist.
Before the Elder deities from Egypt’s fogs were born
The gods of Easter Island stood up to greet the morn.
Before Mylitta knew the light or ever Bel had birth
The gods of Easter Island were rulers of the earth.
Before the bulls of Nineveh were hewn out of their stone
The gods of Easter Island stood silent and alone.
The gods of Easter Island saw kingdoms come and go
And shrines and idols shattered as tides that ebb and flow.
They saw the kite-winged Horus sweep down the beach to drink.
They saw Atlantis topple and Lemuria sink.
They brood through Topaz eventide when tropic day is done;
I see them o’er the ocean, black in the dying sun.
Published in The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1: 1923-1929, June 2007.
They set me up on high, a marble saint,
As if to guard the virtue of the park.
My flanks are gaunt, my gaze is cold and stark,
For I must look the part the liars paint,
They’ve cleansed my history of fleshy taint.
The elders bid the younger people mark
How virtuous I gleam against the dark—
Could I but speak I’d make the bastards faint.
Great God, how could they know the lusty zest,
The love of life that made my sinews dance?—
Below me now, against my base, inert,
A lousy tramp, a sleeping house-maid rest,
I yearn for that square flask in his old pants.
My fingers burn to feel beneath her skirt.
Published in The Grim Land and Others, 1976. Compare Sonora to Del Rio.
From Sonora to Del Rio is a hundred barren miles
Where the sotol weave and shimmer in the sun—
Like a horde of rearing serpents swaying down the bare defiles
When the scarlet, silver webs of dawn are spun.
There are little ’dobe ranchoes brooding far along the sky,
On the sullen dreary bosoms of the hills;
Not a wolf to break the quiet, not a desert bird to fly
Where the silence is so utter that it thrills.
With an eery sense of vastness, with a curious sense of age,
And the ghosts of eons gone uprear and glide
Like a horde of drifting shadows gleaming through the wilted sage—
They are riding where of old they used to ride.
Muleteer and caballero, with their plunder and their slaves—
Oh, the clink of ghostly stirrups in the morn!
Oh, the soundless flying clatter of the feathered, painted braves,
Oh, the echo of the spur and hoof and horn.
Maybe, in the heat of evening, comes a wind from Mexico
Laden with the heat of seven hells,
And the rattler in the yucca and the buzzard dark and slow
Hear and understand the grisly tales it tells.
Gaunt and stark and bare and mocking rise the everlasting cliffs
Like a row of sullen giants hewn of stone,
Till the traveler, mazed with silence, thinks to look on hieroglyphs,
Thinks to see a carven Pharaoh on his throne.
Once these sullen hills were beaches and they saw the ocean flee
In the misty ages never known of men,
And they wait in brooding silence till the everlasting sea
Comes foaming forth to claim her own again.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 12, No. 3 (September 1928). Compare Dreaming on Downs.
I heard the harp of Alfred
As I went o’er the downs,
When thorn-trees stood at even
Like monks in dusky gowns;
I heard the music Guthrum heard
Beside the wasted towns;
When Alfred, like a peasant,
Came harping down the hill,
And the drunken Danes made merry
With the man they sought to kill,
And the Saxon king laughed in their beards
And bent them to his will.
I heard the harp of Alfred
As twilight waned to night;
I heard ghost armies tramping
As the dim stars flamed white;
And Guthrum walked at my left hand,
And Alfred at my right.
Published in Always Comes Evening, 1957. Shares lines with A Rattlesnake Sings in the Grass.
Oh, brother coiling in the acrid grass,
Lift not for me your sibilant refrain:
Less deadly venom slavers from your fangs
Than courses fiercely in my every vein.
A single victim satisfied your hate,
But I would see walled cities crash and reel,
Gray-bearded sages blown from cannon-mouths,
And infants spitted on the reddened steel.
And I would see the stars come thundering down,
The foaming oceans break their brimming bowl—
Oh, universal ruin would not serve
To glut the fury of my maddened soul!
Published in The Daniel Baker Collegian, 15 March 1926, the newspaper of Daniel Baker College of Brownwood.
(In Illusion, seeking to express myself in the clearest manner possible, I have, for this effect, violated the rules common to rhythm and poetry.)
I stood upon surf-booming cliffs
And heard the tide-race roaring, roaring strong and deep and free;
On tall wind wings the white clouds scudded by.
Far to the eat the ocean met the sky
And the booming cliffs re-echoed to the thunder of the sea.
Green are the waves and fringed with white the crest:
Strong colour contrasts, turquoise, sapphire, now.
Tumbling the jade green billows from the west
Roars the wild sea-wind. Keep your sea. I go.
Stranger to me the fierce red-blooded zest,
The wild beast urge, the primitive behest.
Fierce primal impulses are thoughts I do not know.
I’ve ever dwelt ’mid worlds of vaguer tone,
All tints and colors merging soft and dim,
No garish flare of reds at the desert’s rim—
The sea-winds murmur there a pleasing drone;
The sea-fogs grace the ocean, friendly, grey.
’Mid soft-hued woodlands shy nymphs have their play.
And so I’ll none of all this garish joy,
These blazing dawns that leap like maids o’er-bold;
The flaming greens and reds and yellows cloy,
Barbaric tints of crimson, blazing gold.
The worlds I seek are like soft, golden chimes;
Soft merging tints that match the breeze’s croon
And no false note plays in the world-scheme rhymes—
I seek soft, vague plateaus of the moon.
Published in Always Comes Evening, 1957.
There burns in me no honeyed drop of love,
Nor soft compassion for my brother man:
I would indeed humanity possessed
A single throat a keen-edged knife could span.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
Maidens of star and of moon,
born from the mists of the age,
I thrill to the touch of your hands,
in the night when the shadows are o’er me.
Your eyes are like the gulfs of the night,
your limbs are like ivory gleaming—
But your lips are more red than is mortal,
and pointed the nails of your fingers.
Published in The Right Hook, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1925). The Golden Caliph (1922 or 1923, one issue) and The Right Hook (1925, three issues) were amateur magazines Howard and Tevis Clyde Smith created as teenagers.
Through the California mountains
And many a wooded vale
The wind from seaward whispers
The name of the Nonpareil.
O’er many a peak snow covered
O’er many a woodland fair
The sea-breeze murmurs the wonderful tale
Of the lad from County Clare.
But never the wind from seaward
And never the brooks of the vale
Can speak the half of the glory,
The due of the Nonpareil.
Champion of all Champions,
Greatest in all times’ bound,
The lad who held Fitzsimmons
For thirteen gory rounds.
But the ring’s red history passes
To a swiftly roving tale,
And there’s few who now remember
The name of the Nonpareil.
But here’s to the greatest of fighters,
To a name that never shall fail,
To the name of the first Jack Dempsey
The wonderful Nonpareil.
Published in The Howard Collector, No. 5 (Summer 1964).
There was a land of which he never spoke.
A girl, perhaps, but no one knew her name,
And few there were who knew from whence he came
For from his past he never raised the cloak.
No word he spake except to sneer or joke,
Or, deep in drink, to curse men, life and Fate;
Often his fierce black eyes, Hell-hot with hate,
Gleamed wolf-like through the shifting powder smoke.
His trail lay through saloon and gambling hall,
Lone, sombre devil in a barren land.
Perhaps, when drunk, he dreamed of mansions old,
Ballrooms and women, proud and fair as gold—
Trail’s-end, upon the strangest stage of all,
The sun, a lone mesquite tree and the sand.
Published in The Ring, June 1928. George Henry “Kid” Lavigne (1869-1928) was the second American boxer to hold the lightweight champion, winning the title on 1 June 1896.
Hang up the battered gloves; Lavigne is dead.
Bold and erect he went into the dark.
The crown is withered and the crowds are fled,
The empty ring stands bare and lone—yet hark:
The ghostly roar of many a phantom throng
Floats down the dusty years, forgotten long.
Hot blazed the lights above the crimson ring
Where there he reigned in his full prime, a king.
The throngs’ acclaim roared up beneath their sheen
And whispered down the night: “Lavigne! Lavigne!”
Red splashed the blood and fierce the crashing blows.
Men staggered to the mat and reeling rose.
Crowns glittered there in splendour, won or lost,
And bones were shattered as the sledges crossed.
Swift as a leopard, strong and fiercely lean,
Champions knew the prowess of Lavigne.
The giant dwarf Joe Walcott saw him loom
And broken, bloody, reeled before his doom.
Handler and Everhardt and rugged Burge
Saw at the last his snarling face emerge
From bloody mists that veiled their dimming sight
Ere they sank down into unlighted night.
Strong men and bold, lay vanquished at his feet.
Mighty was he in triumph and defeat.
Far fade the echoes of the ringside’s cheers
And all is lost in mists of dust-dead years.
Cold breaks the dawn; the East is ghastly red.
Hand up the broken gloves; Lavigne is dead.
Published in The Tattler, 6 January 1925, the newspaper of Brownwood High School. A parody of Robert W. Service.
A bunch of the girls were whooping it up
In the old Lip-stick saloon,
And the kid at the player-piano
Was twanging a jazzy tune,
When out of the night with perfume on his shirt
And stacomb upon his hair,
A young man staggered inside the door
And meowed like a grizzly-bear.
He kicked the kid off the piano stool
And sat him down to play.
The piano yowled like an old tom cat
To the tune of “Hip! Hurray!”
Says he, “Gals, you don’t know me,
But, by gosh, I know you,
And one of you is a classy dame,
And that one is Sal Snooboo!”
She squawked and somebody turned the lights,
Something went “Smack!” in the dark.
There was nothing for anybody to do
But to stand still and s****** and hark.
Somebody turned the lights on,
And Sally was standing there,
But the stranger wasn’t; he was done,
And Sal was arranging her hair.
Published in American Poet, April 1929.
Orchid, jasmine and heliotrope
Scent the gloom where the dead men grope.
Silver, ruby-eyed leopards crouch
At the carven ends of the silken couch.
A purple mist of a perfume rare
Billows and sways, and weights the air.
The pale blue domes of the ceiling rise
Gemmed and carved like opium skies—
Golden serpents with crystal eyes.
Why should men grow strange and cold,
Like a marble heart in a breast of gold?
Their eyes are ice and they look strange tales,
They carve the mist with their long jade nails.
Orchid, jasmine and heliotrope
Scent the gloom where dead men grope;
They have stabbed their hearts with a golden sword
And hanged themselves with a silken rope.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 19, No. 3 (March 1932). Similar to The Last Hour.
Hinged in the brooding west a black sun hung,
And Titan shadows barred the dying world.
The blind black oceans groped—their tendrils curled,
And writhed and fell in feathered spray and clung,
Climbing the granite ladders, rung by rung,
Which held them from the tribes whose death-cries skirled.
Above unholy fires red wings unfurled—
Gray ashes floated down from where they swung.
A demon crouched, chin propped on brutish fist,
Gripping a crystal ball between his knees.
His skull-mouth gaped and icy shone his eye.
Down crashed the crystal globe—a fire-shot mist
Masked the dark lands which sank below the seas—
A painted sun hung in the starless sky.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 31, No. 6 (June 1938). Similar to The Last Day. Fifth and last of the Sonnets out of Bedlam.
Hinged in the brooding west a black sun hung,
And Titan shadows barred the dying world.
The blind black oceans groped; their tendrils curled
And writhed and fell in feathered spray, and clung,
Climbing the granite ladders, rung by rung,
Which held them from the tribes whose death-cries skirled.
Above, unholy fires red wings unfurled—
Gray ashes floated down from where they swung.
A demon crouched, chin propped on brutish fist,
Gripping a crystal ball between his knees;
His skull-mouth gaped, and icy shone his eye.
Down crashed the crystal globe—beneath the seas
The dark lands sank—Ione in a fire-shot mist,
A painted sun hung in a starless sky.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
Laughter’s the lure of the gods; therefore must ye laugh
Mocking Destiny’s nods, a strong wind driving the chaff
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007. Earlier version than Lesbia [2] (published in Desire and Other Erotic Poems, 1989).
From whence came this grim desire?
What was the wine in my blood?
What raced through my veins like fire
And beat at my brain like a flood?
Bare is the desert’s dust,
Deep is the emerald sea—
Barer my deathless lust,
Deeper the hunger of me.
Goddess I sit and brood—
They cringe to my Hell-lit eyes,
The wretched women nude
I have gripped between my thighs.
As they writhed between my hands
And the ocean heard their screams
Firing my passion’s brands
As I dreamed my lurid dreams.
Their breath came fast and hot,
Their tresses were Hades’ mesh;
World and the worlds were not;
Flesh against pulsing flesh.
Their white limbs fluttered and tossed,
They whimpered beneath my grasp
And their maindenhood was lost
In strange unnatural clasp.
Hours my pleasure beguiled
The green Arcadian glades,
As idle mornings I whiled
With free-hipped country maids.
Under the star-gemmed skies
That looked upon curious scenes
I have spread the round white things
Of naked and frightened queens.
What was it turned my face
From brown-limbed Grecian boys,
Weary of their embrace
To darker and barer joys?
A miser weary of coins
I wearied of early charms,
Of youths who ungirt my loins,
Restless sighed in their arms.
With many a youth I lay,
But their wine to me was dregs.
I found scant joy in they
Who parted my supple legs.
I turned to the loves I prize;
Found joy amid perfumed curls,
In a maiden’s amorous sighs,
In the tears of naked girls.
These are the wine of delight—
A girl’s ungirdled charms,
A woman’s laugh in the night
As she lies in my eager arms.
Goddess I sit and laugh,
Nude as the scornful moon—
World and the worlds are chaff
Say, shall my day be soon?
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
I set my soul to a wild lute
And taught my feet to dance.
I float, a broken straw,
Upon the Sea of Chance.
Published in The Howard Collector, #18 (Autumn 1973). Alternative title: Youth Spoke—Not in Anger.
They bruised my soul with a proverb,
They bruised my back with a rod,
And they bade me bow to my elders,
For that was the word of God.
They pent up my soul and bound me
Till life was a living death,
They struck the wine from my fingers,
The passion from my breath.
I reached my hands to living,
They hurled me back into school,
And they said, “Go learn your lessons,
“You innocent young fool.”
They yowled till they woke the trumpets—
And the sword blade rent the plow,
And they said, “It is your duty
“To die for your elders now.”
They cowered far from the battle
As I went to the strife,
And I spilled my guts in the trenches
In the red dawn of my life.
And the elders named me hero,
But more than their words and ire
Was the scent of a strange wild flower
There where I died in the mire.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
Oh, G.B.S., oh, G.B.S.,
You lousy son of a bitch,
You lift your yawp across the world
Like a bullfrog in a ditch.
I would that by foliage which
Your scholarly phizz thatches
Tied to a smoking stake you were
By a tribe of wild Apaches
You could deride them in that style
Of which you’re so enamored,
While someone with a tomahawk
Your lordly cranium hammered.
And several thousand dancing braves,
The more the merrier,
Were sticking Spanish Daggers in
Your antequate posterior.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 32, No. 2 (August 1938).
The Black Door gapes and the Black Wall rises;
Twilight gasps in the grip of Night.
Paper and dust are the gems man prizes—
Torches toss in my waning sight.
Drums of glory are lost in the ages,
Bare feet fail on a broken trail—
Let my name fade from the printed pages;
Dreams and visions are growing pale.
Twilight gathers and none can save me.
Well and well, for I would not stay:
Let me speak through the stone you grave me:
He never could say what he wished to say.
Why should I shrink from the sign of leaving?
My brain is wrapped in a darkened cloud;
Now in the Night are the Sisters weaving
For me a shroud.
Towers shake and the stars reel under,
Skulls are heaped in the Devil’s fane;
My feet are wrapped in a rolling thunder,
Jets of agony lance my brain.
What of the world that I leave for ever?
Phantom forms in a fading sight—
Carry me out on the ebon river
Into the Night.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
I am a golden lure.
I am the laughter of false goddesses.
I go disguised as Love.
Men are my slaves.
Women are my slaves.
I am a goddess and the world is my shrine.
I am the night wind
Blowing through the leaves.
I am the moonlight of a hidden glade.
I am starlight
On a palace.
I am Lust.
Published in The Progress, 1 February 1924, published by Cross Plains High School.
She was snoozing on her sweezer,
Many a goofish year ago,
And a smile was on her beezer,
As she gently scratched her toe.
She, the Maiden of Kercheezer,
Hair as black as a harness tug,
As is fluttered in the breezer,
O’er her lovely, girlish mug.
Evening dress of green and yeller,
What a shoulder she could shake
And she had a nifty feller,
Hight the knight of Duckandrake.
He was knock-kneed, she was cross-eyed,
Oh, they were a lovely pair,
How he’d fondly knock her hoss-eyed,
As she gently pulled out his hair.
And her folks didn’t like his beezer,
But what difference did that make?
And the maiden of Kercheezer, ever
Eloped with noble Duckandrake.
Published in The Howard Collector, Spring 1972.
The men of the East are decked in steel,
They march with a trumpet’s din,
They glitter with silks and golden scales,
And high kings boast their kin—
We of the West wear the hides of wolves,
But our hearts are steel within.
They of the East ride gallant steeds,
Their spears are long and brown;
Their shields are set with sparkling stones,
And each knight wears a crown—
We fight on foot as our forebears fought,
And we drag the rider down.
We race the steed of the Saxon knight
Across the naked fen—
They of the East are full of pride,
Cubs of the Lion’s den.
They boast they breed a race of kings—
But we of the West breed Men.
Published in Fantasy Crossroads, #8 (May 1976).
“Nay, have no fear. The man was blind,” said she.
“How could he see ’twas we that took his gold?
“The devil, man! I thought you were bold!”
“This is a chancy business!” muttered he,
“And we’ll be lucky if we get to sea.
“The fellow deals with demons, I’ve been told.”
“Let’s open the chest, shut up and take a hold.”
Then silence as they knocked the hinges free.
A glint of silver and a sheen of jade—
Two strange gems gleaming from a silken fold—
Rare plunder—gods, was that a hidden blade?
A scream, a curse, two bodies stark and cold.
With jewel eyes above them crawled and swayed
The serpent left to watch the miser’s gold.
Published in The Cross Plainsman, August 2004.
These be kings of men,
Lords of the Ultimate Night,
Kings-of-the-desert and fen—
Jackal, vulture, and kite.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 13, No. 4 (April 1929).
I walked in Tara’s Wood one summer night,
And saw, amid the still, star-haunted skies,
A slender moon in silver mist arise,
And hover on the hill as if in fright.
Burning, I seized her veil and held her tight:
An instant all her glow was in my eyes;
Then she was gone, swift as a white bird flies,
And I went down the hill in opal light.
And soon I was aware, as down I came,
That all was strange and new on every side;
Strange people went about me to and fro,
And when I spoke with trembling mine own name
They turned away, but one man said: “He died
In Tara Wood, a hundred years ago.”
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 21, No. 5 (May 1933).
Golden goats on a hillside black,
Silken gown on a wharf-side trull,
Screaming girl on a silver rack—
What are dreams in a shadowed skull?
I stood at a shrine and Chiron died,
A woman laughed from the purple roofs,
And he burned and lived and rose in his pride
And shattered the tiles with clanging hoofs.
I opened a volume dark and rare,
I lighted a candle of mystic lore—
Bare feet throbbed on the outer stair
And book and candle sank to the floor.
Ships that reel on the windy sea,
Lovers that take the world to wife,
What may the Traitress hold for me
Who scarce have lifted the veil of life?
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 14, No. 3 (September 1929).
They haled him to the crossroads
As day was at its close;
They hung him to the gallows
And left him for the crows.
His hands in life were bloody,
His ghost will not be still;
He haunts the naked moorlands
About the gibbet hill.
And oft a lonely traveler
Is found upon the fen
Whose dead eyes hold a horror
Beyond the world of men.
The villagers then whisper,
With accents grim and dour:
“This man has met at midnight
The phantom of the moor.”
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
Grass and the rains and snow,
Trumpet and tribal drum;
Across my crests the people go
Over my peaks the people come.
Girt with the pelts of lion and hare.
Plodding with oxen wains,
Climbing the steeps on a Spanish mare,
Soaring in aeroplanes.
Men with their hates and their ires,
Men with their loves and their lust
Still shall I reign when their spires
And their castles tumble to dust.
Published in Witchcraft & Sorcery, , January/February 1971.
The little poets sing of little things:
Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings;
Lovers who kissed and then were made as one,
And modest flowers waving in the sun.
The mighty poets write in blood and tears
And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears.
They reach their mad blind hands into the night,
To plumb abysses dead to human sight;
To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled,
Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world.
Published in The Ghost Ocean, 1982. Tentative title.
Rise to the peak of the ladder
Where the ghosts of the planets feast—
Out of the reach of the adder—
Never beyond the Beast.
He is there, in the abyss brooding,
Where the nameless black fires fall;
He is there, in the stars intruding,
Where the sun is a silver ball.
Beyond all weeping or revel,
He lurks in the cloud and the sod;
He grips the doors of the Devil
And the hasp on the gates of God.
Build and endeavor and fashion—
Never can you escape
The blind black brutish passion—
The lust of the primal Ape.
Published in The Cross Plainsman, August 2006.
I have anchored my ship to a quiet port;
A land that is holy and blest.
But I gaze through my bars at the tempest’s sport
And I long for the sea’s unrest.
Published in The Cross Plainsman, August 2006.
The strong winds whisper o’er the sea,
Flinging the gray-gnarled ocean’s spate;
The gray waves lash along the lea.
The lone gull’s wings are high and free,
The great seal trumpets for his mate;
The high winds drum, the wild winds dree.
The gray shoals roar unceasingly,
Where combers march in kingly state,
The crest-crowned monarchs of the sea.
And now, along the lone, white lea,
The surges fade, the winds abate.
And the wide sea lies silently.
But far to islands, restlessly
Surges the tide, unreined and great,
Forever roaming and forever free.
And thus my soul, forever restlessly, Longs for the outworld, vast, unultimate,The vasty freedom of the swinging sea,Forever roaming and forever free.
Published in The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 2: 1930-1932, October 2007. Note: the title is One Blood Stain in wikipedia’s main list, but One Blood Strain in the actual document linked to.
Now autumn comes and summer goes,
And rises in my heart again,
As witchfire glimmers through a pool,
The mystic madness of the Dane.
Blue thunder of a foaming sea
Reverberating through my sleep,
White billowing sails that fill and flee
Across a wind-swept restless deep—
They speak to me with subtle tongue
Of blue-bright ways my forbears trod,
When time the bearded Vikings bent
Their oars against the winds of God.
And I am but a common man
Who treads a dreary way ashore,
But oceans thunder in my dreams,
And blue waves break on creaking beams,
And foaming water swirls and creams
About the strongly bending oar.
When summer goes and autumn comes
To paint the leaves with sombre fires,
I feel, like throbs of distant drums,
The urge of distant nameless sires.
Published in Modern American Poetry, 1933.
I think when I am old a furtive shape
Will sit beside me at my fireless hearth,
Dabbled with blood from stumps of severed wrists,
And flecked with blackened bits of mouldy earth.
My blood ran fire when the deed was done;
Now it runs colder than the moon that shone
On shattered fields where dead men lay in heaps
Who could not hear a ravished daughter’s moan.
(Dim through the bloody dawn on bitter winds
The throbbing of the distant guns was brought
When I reeled like a drunkard from the hut
That hid the horror my red hands had wrought.)
So now I fire my veins with stinging wine,
And hoard my youth as misers hug their gold,
Because I know what shape will come and sit
Beside my crumbling hearth—when I am old.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 20, No. 3 (September 1932).
Behind the Veil what gulfs of Time and Space?
What blinking mowing Shapes to blast the sight?
I shrink before a vague colossal Face
Born in the mad immensities of Night.
Published in The Cross Plainsman, August 2004.
My soul is a blaze
Of passionate desire;
My soul is a blaze
That sets my pen on fire.
Published in The Yellow Jacket, 13 January 1927, the newspaper of Howard Payne College. One line was omitted in all printed versions; the first line originally ended “Harlem coon”.
(As an aid to remembrance of November 11th, 1918.)
The night was dark as a Harlem coon
Smoke and clounds once lin’ the moon;
Flares goin’ up with a venomous sound,
Bustin’ and throwin’ a green light around.
An’, yeah, there was me cursin’ my soul
For losin’ meself from the raidin’ patrol.
Creepin’ along in the mud and the slime,
Cussin’ and havin’ the Devil’s own time.
Smeared and spattered with Flanders mire,
Tearin’ me clothes on the loose barbwire.
I’m crawlin’ along, keepin’ close to the ground,
When all of a sudden I hears me a sound.
I halt and I listen, it’s too dark for sight
But some bird’s ahead of me there in the night.
I reached for my gun—then I swear through me teeth
For somewhere the thing’s fallen out of its sheath.
But before I can move, I hear feet a-slush
And something to meself: “Come right ahead Fritz,
I’ve lost me gat but I’ve got me mitts.”
I sidestep quick as he makes his spring,
His bay’net flashes, I duck, I swing!
Flush on the jaw my right he stops,
Down in the muck on his face he flops.
I’m cursin’ him for a bloody Hun
As I loosen the bay’net off his gun.
I feel for his ribs ’neath his tunic drab
For I’ve only time for a single stab.
I feel a locket a-danglin there,
I jerk it out, then a rocket’s flare
Limns it in light like crimson flame
And I see the face of a white haired dame
And German letters beneath it run,
Which I take to mean “To my darlin’ son.”
I haul that Hun up onto his pegs,
And I says, “Get goin’; and shake your legs.
Your line are that way, now get gone.”
And I hends him a boot to help him on.
Saying, “Make tracks on your homeward path,
With the compliments of Monk Magrath.”
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
I dare not join my sisters in the street;
I think of people’s talk, the cynic stare.
Fierce envy makes me scornful of their play,
And hide my lust behind a haughty air.
Published in The Poet’s Scroll, February 1929.
The marble statues tossed against the sky
In gestures blind as though to rend and kill,
Not one upon his pedestal was still.
Stiff fingers clutched at winds that whispered by,
And from the white lips rose a deathly cry:
“Cursed be the hands that broke us from the hill!
There slumber of unbirth was ours till
They gave us life that cannot live or die.”
And then as from a dream I stirred and woke—
Sublime and still each statue raised its head,
Etched pure and cold against the leafy green,
No limb was moved, no sigh the silence broke;
And people walked amid the grove and said:
“How peaceful these white gods!—aye, how serene.”
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 32, No. 5 (November 1938).
I have not heard lutes beckon me, nor the brazen bugles call,
But once in the dim of a haunted lea I heard the silence fall.
I have not heard the regal drum, nor seen the flags unfurled,
But I have watched the dragons come, fire-eyed, across the world.
I have not seen the horsemen fall before the hurtling host,
But I have paced a silent hall where each step waked a ghost.
I have not kissed the tiger-feet of a strange-eyed golden god,
But I have walked a city’s street where no man else had trod.
I have not raised the canopies that shelter revelling kings,
But I have fled from crimson eyes and black unearthly wings.
I have not knelt outside the door to kiss a pallid queen,
But I have seen a ghostly shore that no man else has seen.
I have not seen the standards sweep from keep and castle wall,
But I have seen a woman leap from a dragon’s crimson stall,
And I have heard strange surges boom that no man heard before,
And seen a strange black city loom on a mystic night-black shore.
And I have felt the sudden blow of a nameless wind’s cold breath,
And watched the grisly pilgrims go that walk the roads of Death,
And I have seen black valleys gape, abysses in the gloom,
And I have fought the deathless Ape that guards the Doors of Doom.
I have not seen the face of Pan, nor mocked the dryad’s haste,
But I have trailed a dark-eyed Man across a windy waste.
I have not died as men may die, nor sinned as men have sinned,
But I have reached a misty sky upon a granite wind.
Published in JAPM: The Poetry Weekly, 16 September 1929.
Thunder in the black skies beating down the rain,
Thunder in the black cliffs, looming o’er the main,
Thunder on the black sea and thunder in my brain.
God’s on the night wind, Satan’s on his throne
By the red lake lurid and great grim stone—
Still through the roofs of Hell the brooding thunders drone.
Trident for a rapier, Satan thrusts and foins
Crouching on his throne with his great goat loins—
Souls are his footstools and hearts are his coins.
Slave of all the ages, though lord of the air;
Solomon o’ercame him, set him roaring there,
Crouching on the coals where the great flames flare.
Thunder from the grim gulfs, out of cosmic deep
Where the red eyes glimmer and the black wings sweep,
Thunder down to Satan, wake him from his sleep!
Thunder on the shores of Hell, scattering the coal,
Riding down the mountain on the moon-mare’s foal,
Blasting out the caves of the gnome and the troll.
Satan, brother Satan, rise and break your chain!
Solomon is dust and his spells grow vain—
Rise through the world in the thunder and the rain.
Rush upon the cities, roaring in your might,
Break down the towers in the moon’s pale light,
Build a wall of corpses for God’s great sight,
Quench the red thunder in my brain this night.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 11, No. 4 (April 1928).
Eight thousand years ago a man I slew;
I lay in wait beside a sparkling rill
There in an upland valley green and still.
The white stream gurgled where the rushes grew;
The hills were veiled in dreamy hazes blue.
He came along the trail; with savage skill
My spear leaped like a snake to make my kill—
Leaped like a striking snake and pierced him through.
And still when blue haze dreams along the sky
And breezes bring the murmur of the sea,
A whisper thrills me where at ease I lie
Beneath the branches of some mountain tree;
He comes, fog-dim, the ghost that will not die,
And with accusing finger points at me.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
How is it that I am what I am
How did I come to fall?
Who was the man my soul to damn
Black in the sight of all?
Who was it came in my virginhood
And in some evil hour
Turned all my life to bad from good
Bruising the tender flower?
I cannot remember the fellow’s name
I had long ago forgot;
I was young and my blood was flame
The person mattered not.
I was hot as a blazing brand
Blood and body and nerve
Ripe to be plucked by the first man’s hand
And any man would serve.
I have had my day, I have had my fling
Men have bowed at my knee.
I sit in the bars where the harlots sing
To sailors hot from the sea.
Sallow my cheeks and my lips have faded
Life’s roses slip my clutch
But my blood is still hot and still unjaded
I can thrill to the deck-hand’s touch.
Still I thrill to the hands of men
I love the contact yet
The breath that is laden with wharfside gin
The scent of tobacco and sweat.
Bristly jowls on my painted cheek
The obscene, whispered jest,
Calloused hands that lustfully seek
My out-worn charms to quest.
My by-gone life is dim and far;
I am content with gin,
A slug of wine, sometimes at the bar,
A room for the sailormen.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 10, No. 4 (October 1927).
Falume of Spain rode forth amain when twilight’s crimson fell
To drink a toast with Bahram’s ghost in the scarlet land of Hell.
His rowels clashed as swift he dashed along the flaming skies;
The sunset rade at his bridle braid and the moon was in his eyes.
The waves were green with an eery sheen over the hills of Thule
And the ripples beat to his horse’s feet like a serpent in a pool.
On vampire wings the shadow things wheeled round and round his head,
Till he came at last to a kingdom vast in the Land of the Restless Dead.
They thronged about in a grisly rout, they caught at his silver rein;
“Avaunt, foul host! Tell Bahram’s ghost Falume has come from Spain!”
Then flame-arrayed rose Bahram’s shade: “What would ye have, Falume?”
“Ho, Bahram who on earth I slew where Tagus’ waters boom,
Now though I shore your life of yore amid the burning West,
I ride to Hell to bid ye tell where I might ride to rest.
My beard is white and dim my sight and I would fain be gone.
Speak without guile: where lies the isle of mystic Avalon?”
“A league beyond the western wind, a mile beyond the moon,
Where the dim seas roar on an unknown shore and the drifting stars lie strewn:
The lotus buds there scent the woods where the quiet rivers gleam,
And king and knight in the mystic light the ages drowse and dream.”
With sudden bound Falume wheeled round, he fled through the flying wrack
Till he came to the land of Spain with the sunset at his back.
“No dreams for me, but living free, red wine and battle’s roar;
I breast the gales and I ride the trails until I ride no more.”
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 11, No. 1 (January 1928).
The riders of Babylon clatter forth
Like the hawk-winged scourgers of Azrael
To the meadow-lands of the South and North
And the strong-walled cities of Israel.
They harry the men of the caravans,
They bring rare plunder across the sands
To deck the throne of the great god Baal.
But Babylon’s king is a broken shell
And Babylon’s queen is a sprite from Hell;
And men shall say, “Here Babylon fell,”
Ere Time has forgot the tale.
The riders of Babylon come and go
From Gaza’s halls to the shores of Tyre;
They shake the world from the lands of snow
To the deserts, red in the sunset’s fire;
Their horses swim in a sea of gore
And the tribes of the earth bow down before;
They have chained the seas where the Cretans sail.
But Babylon’s sun shall set in blood;
Her towers shall sink in a crimson flood;
And men shall say, “Here Babylon stood,”
Ere Time forgot the tale.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
I am a saintly reformer,
basking in goodly reknown
Sure of applaud of the righteous,
cinctured in purity’s gown.
Young men and old men revere me,
women and girls out of school
Come to me telling their secrets,
seeking my counseling cool.
Little they know of my story
when I was the water-front’s toast.
Back in the days of my glory
down on the Barbary Coast.
Young and my lips full and crimson,
flaming with passionate blood,
My love was the leap of an ocean,
my passion the swing of the flood.
Changing and varied my fancies
yet no woman ever gave more
For I joyed in the man on my body
just as much as the one just before
Ah, nights that were lurid and gorgeous,
under the bar lamps blaze
Flutter of cars on the table,
faces that leered through the haze
Of smoke drifting up from the stogies,
the red liquor flowing free
And the shout of the salty ballass
that sailors sang from the sea.
The money scattered like water,
the pagan thrill of the dance
The hand that groped in my clothing,
the burning and meaning glance
Then the look as the stair I mounted,
the man that left the floor,
The joyous and panting waiting,
the stealthy knock at my door—
What if they knew, the elders,
that I was a Barbary whore?
Hiding my charms with meekness
under purity’s gown
Sure of applaud of the righteous,
basking in goodly reknown.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
There is a strangeness in my soul
A dark and brooding sea.
Nor all the waves on Capri’s shoal
Might stay the thirst of me.
For men have come and men have gone
For pleasure or for hire.
Though they lay broken at the dawn
They did not quench my fire.
My pity is a deathly ruth
I burn men with my eyes.
Oh, would all men were one strong youth
To break between my thighs.
Any many a man his fortune spread
To glut my ecstacy
As I lay panting on his bed
In shameless nudity.
But all of ancient Egypt’s gold
Can never equal this,
Nor all the treasures kingdoms hold,
A single hour of bliss.
Within my villa’s high domain
Are boys from Britain’s rocks
And dark eyed slender lads from Spain
And Greeks with perfumed locks.
And youths of soft and subtle speech
From furtherest Orient,
Wherever arms of legions reach
And Roman chains are sent.
Why may I not be satiate
With kisses of some boy—
They only rouse my passions spate
I never know such joy
As when through chambers filled with noise
Of wails and pleas and sighs
I stride among my naked boys
With whips that bruise their thighs.
I drift through mists red flaming flung
On hills of ecstacies
As shoulder-wealed and buttock-stung
They shriek and kiss my knees.
Published in A Rhyme of Salem Town and Other Poems, 2002.
I am king of all the Ages
I am ruler of the stars
I am master of Time’s pages
And I mock at chain and bars.
Now, as when I sailed the world
Ere the galley’s sails were furled
And the barnacles had crusted on their spars.
I am strife, I am Life,
I am mistress, I am wife!
I am wilder than the sea wind, I am fiercer than the fire!
I am tale and song and fable, I am Akkad, I am Babel,
I am Cairo, I am Carthage, I am Tyre!
For I walked the streets of Gaza
when the world was wild and young,
And I reveled in Carchemish when the golden minstrels sung;
All the world-road was my path, as I sang the songs of Gath
Or trod the streets of Nineveh where harlots roses flung.
I swam the wide Euphrates
where it wanders through the plain
And I saw the dawn come flaming over Tyre.
I walked the roads of Ammon
when the hills were veiled in rain,
And I watched the stars anon from the walls of Askalon
And I rose the plains of Palestine beneath the dawning’s fire
When the leaves upon the trees danced
and fluttered in the breeze
And a slim girl of Juda went singing to a lyre.
Published in The Daniel Baker Collegian, 12 April 1926, the newspaper of Daniel Baker College of Brownwood.
Let others croon of lover’s moon,
Of roses, birds on wing,
Maidens, the waltz’s dreaming tune,—
Of strong thewed deeds I sing.
Let poets seek the tinted reek,
Perfume of ladies gay,
Of winds of wild outlands I speak,
The lash of far sea spray.
Of dear swamp brakes, of storm whipped lakes,
Dank jungle, reedy fen,
Of seas that pound the plunging strakes,
Of men and deeds of men.
Prospector; king of the battling ring;
Tarred slave of tide’s behests,
Monarchs of muscle shall I sing,
Lords of the hairy chests.
Though some may stay ’neath cities away,
To toil with maul and hod,
To outer trails most take their way,
To lands yet scarcely trod.
The torrent’s might, the dizzy height,
Shall never bate their breath,
With desert’s toils they match their might,
And hurl their mocks at Death.
The tropic creek, the jungle reek
That steams through sullen trees,
The boding wild where leopards shriek
Holds never fear for these.
Nor do they shrink from hell’s own brink,
When kites low wheeling fly,
And circling near the jackals slink,
And sands stretch bare to sky.
Far swing their trails through calms and gales,
From Polar sea to Horn,
From bleak ice-glittering peaks and vales,
To sun-kissed seas of morn.
In driving snow, where arctic floe
Surges though ice-reft straits,
Where bergs sweep southward, row on row,
And wind fiends shriek their hates.
Where the broad sun smiles on a hundred isles
With the long sea reach between,
And the lone gull wheels for a thousand miles,
And the reefs lift fanged and lean.
On Polar trails where the screeching gales
Bellow and roar and blow,
And the skies are gone while the firece wind rails,
And the path fades in the snow.
By atolls lean where ships careen,
In the sullen, still lagoon.
And crouching bushman’s spear is a sheen
In the light of the shuddering moon.
In the marshy swamp, in the jungle damp,
Tall trees in marching lines,
That echo again to the tusker’s tramp,
Where the tiger glides through the vines.
On mountains bleak, on cliff and peak,
From Pole to Pole and Line,
Adventure still they ever seek,
Adventure still they find.
Published in The Progress, 1 February 1924, published by Cross Plains High School.
Rule I.
Always Be Polite
If a girl stops you to talk while you are chasing your trains,
And it looks like they’re going to lose ye,
Just up with your musket and knock out her brains,
Saying, “Miss, you’ll have to excuse me.”
Rule II.
Never Be Rude
If a tiresome guy should happen to call,
And stay and stay without leaving at all,
Just heave him out of the door on his dome,
And maybe he’ll take the hint and go home.
Rule III.
Be Considerate of Ladies
If you were going down the street,
And a pretty girl you chance to meet,
Don’t hit her if she should you slight,
A swiftish kick is more polite.
Rule IV.
Examples
There was a guy named McDoodles,
With a face like an Austrian poodle’s,
When folks said, “What a beeze—
You big piece of cheese!”
Why, he’d wallop them all on their noodles.
Rule V.
Be Courteous
When a tailor’s solicitor calls at your door,
Don’t make him a greeting with your forty-four;
Don’t give him a scowl and a horrible glare,
And say, “You poor fish! You bum! Take the air!”
He may be a bum and he may be a boob,
But it’s none of your business if he’s even a rube.
He’s a human, although he may not look the part,
Either give him some clothes or a good running start.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
I saw a mermaid sporting in the bay,
Far down, far down where blew no roaring gale;
About her snowy shoulders flashed the spray,
The waves played emerald at her sinewy tail;
She swam a jade and golden, star-set way,
Where all the rainbow colors seemed to play—
She vanished at the Swedish captain’s hail
Who bid me go to Hell and furl a sail.
Published in A Robert E. Howard Memorial: June 13-15, 1986, 1986. Tentative title. Transcript provided by Glenn Lord for publication in The End of the Trail: Western Stories, 2005.
Here where the post-oaks crown the ridge, and the dreary sand-drifts lie,
I’ll sit in the tangle of chaparral till my enemy passes by—
Till the shotgun speaks beneath my hand to my enemy passing by.
(My grandfather came from Tennessee,
And a fine blue broadcloth coat wore he—
In a ragged, torn shirt I wait
For my enemy passing by.)
The drouth burned up the wheat I sowed, my gaunt scrub-cattle died,
Because the winter pasture failed, and the last branch-water dried.
The young corn withered where it stood in the field on the bare hill-side.
I had one horse to work my land—one horse, and he was lame;
I hid my still in the shinnery where no one ever came.
I hid it deep in the thickets; the corn was from my own bin,
The laws would never have found it, but my neighbor turned me in.
For an old spite I’d clean forgot, my neighbor turned me in.
(When my grandfather was a lad,
A hundred slaves his father had;
He clothed them better than I am clad.
They were sleek and fat and prime,
I’ve been hungry many a time.
They fed full, child, man and wife;
I’ve been hungry most of my life.)
I found a man to go my bond—he knows that I won’t run;
I’ve never been forty miles from home; the drouth starved all my steers.
The sinking sun is shining on the barrel of my gun.
They’d try me in the county court and give me seven years.
Seven years behind the bars because they found my still;
He showed it to the snooping laws, the man I’m going to kill.
Then they’ll give me Life or the Chair, according to the judge’s will,
Death’s not so damned hard to a man that’s lived all his life on a postoak hill.
(When my grandfather first came West
Was never a fence on the prairie’s breast,
There was land to choose, and he chose the best,
But it slipped through his fingers, like the rest,
Driving his sons to the sand-hills’ crest.)
The post-oaks stand up dull and brown against the tawny sky;
I hate them like I hate the man who’ll soon be passing by;
At fifty feet I can not miss, I’m going to watch him die.
Die like the dirty dog he is, where the drifted sand-beds lie.
Published in The Howard Collector #1 (Summer 1961), and Fire and Sleet and Candlelight, 1961, but it is uncertain which was first. Originally untitled.
Slow sift the sands of Time; the yellowed leaves
Go drifting down an old and bitter wind;
Across the frozen moors the hedges stand
In tattered garments that the frost have thinned.
A thousand phantoms pluck my ragged sleeve,
Wan ghosts of souls long into darkness thrust.
Their pale lips tell lost dreams I thought mine own,
And old sick longings smite my heart to dust.
I may not even dream of jeweled dawns,
Nor sing with lips that have forgot to laugh.
I fling aside the cloak of Youth and limp
A withered man upon a broken staff.
Published in The Baylor United Statement, Spring 1923, and The Cross Plains Review, 29 June 1923, but it is uncertain which was first.
The sea, the sea, the rolling sea!
High flung, wide swinging, so wild and free,
The leaping waves with their white-capped crest
The plunge and lunge on the ocean’s breats
Like wild, white horses racing free,
With the swing of the rolling, surging sea!
The white sea cloud that drifts like a dream;
The sea-gulls that skim o’er the waves, and scream;
The dolphin’s plunge and the petrel’s nest,
That is borne to land on the tide-race crest:
And all that goes, from mid-ocean to lea,
To make up the rolling, the surging sea!
Can ye stand on the peaceful, quiet lea,
And gaze on the tumbling, tossing sea,
Out o’er the surge and the white waves’ crest,
Nor feel a longing within your breast?
A drawing, a pull, be it day or night,
That tempts ye to dare the ocean’s might.
I stood on the deck of a ship offshore
And harked to the awesome and deafening roar
Of the ocean waves when they struck the reefs,
High tossed on the tide like crested chiefs
Whose plumes toss high ’bove the battling hordes,
Where leap the lances and flash the swords.
And the mighty waves rose high and steep
To the hand of the waves that smote the deep.
And my soul leaped wild, and my would leaped free,
To the leap and the swing of the rolling sea!
And my soul was freed with that ocean leap,
And it plumed the depths of the mighty deep!
Down, down, down where the mermaids ride,
Down where the things of the deep sea glide.
Down where the ships, long sunken, float,
War-ship and galley and coracle boat;
Down beyond reach of the storms or the tides,
To the coral halls where old Triton hides!
And I saw the mermaids and the mermen play,
The the kraken and sea-serpent locked in fray.
And all the ocean-marvels that be,
And the wonderful monsters of the sea.
I wandered ’mongst beautiful sea-flowers,
Where the castle built by the polyp towers,
Where the waters glitter with strange sea-jade,
And the sea-things swim through the deep-sea glade.
And then my soul came back on me,
Back through the surge of the swinging sea.
But still I gaze from the quiet lea,
And long for the swing of the plunging sea.
Published in The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1: 1923-1929, June 2007.
There is a serpent lifts his crest o’ nights
And hisses in the darkness of my room.
His substance and the cloaking night are one;
His form is of the soft, thick, musky dark.
His strange eyes glimmer and his scales are loud
Yet none but I can hear—and scarcely I.
His gliding whispers shake my sluggish soul
With strange wild fires and lights of other dreams.
He loops himself about me in the dark;
I struggle with a strange, wild ecstasy
And seek, yet would not wish, to free my limbs.
Strange shudders shake my limbs at his cold touch
As coil on coil he laps my naked form.
Colder than ice he is, yet in my soul
He kindles fires more hot that Hades’ breath.
With soft insidious whisper at my cheek
He lures me to the midnight’s curious joys.
I rise and follow. All the land is still.
The crescent moon hangs breathless in the sky,
Whose crystal deeps are pierced with pointed stars.
Through woodlands silver black he leads me on.
Over the terraced swards where fountains dance,
Until the moon lights up a window sill.
My naked feet no hint of sound may make.
We glide together o’er the silver sill.
I hear the velvet hangings swish behind
Like whisper of some crimson nightmare’s wings.
My feet sink deep in rugs of silken weave
And like a ghost I bend above the bed,
A girl lies there, her sleeping lips a-smile
On soft arm pillowing the golden head.
Her tender limbs stretched out in light repose.
There is no gown to veil her symmetry.
She lies and shimmers ivory in the moon.
Those perfect, scarlet lips were made to kiss;
My arm should be about that slender waist.
But here the serpent rustles grisly scales.
And sways beside me like a fearful tree.
His whispers speak of deeper, fiercer lusts,
Of wilder joys, most terrible and strange.
That change soft dreams to nightmares red and grim.
He indicates the curves of that soft breast;
He whispers of the red wine which is blood.
He makes me feel the thrill that’s born of death.
This is not earthly—from what darkened world,
What shadowed planet, what inhuman sphere
Come such wild dreams, such fearsome fantasies?
The serpent bids me stoop to that soft breast
To let the dagger kiss—with one swift thrust—
Death should be beautiful, then crouching by
Watch with quick breath and glinting eye the blood
Drain slowly from that soft, rose-tinted cheek
Until the wine has oozed from every vein
Leaving her marble white and marble cold
Like some inhuman goddess from a star.
Drained clean of all the grosser things of life.
Then raise her gently from the ruby lake
And kiss her cheeks as one who knows true sin.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
I am the symbol of Creation and Destruction
I am the beginning and the end.
With my tail in my mouth
I am the Circle of Eternity.
Wisdom is in my eyes
And the dusk of wisdom lurks amid my coils.
My track circles the world
And I loop my coils around the Universe.
My head waves among the stars
And the nations fall prostrate before me.
Coiled, head upright, I am the spirit of the sea.
The world-shaking dinosaur was my henchman
And the flying dragons were my footmen.
The ancients knew me.
They reared shrines and altars
And I taught them dim, dusky wisdom.
I coiled in the ruins of Troy and Babylon
And on the forgotten streets of Nineveh.
The Norse called me Midgaard and built their galleys
Like a sea-serpent.
The Egyptians and the Indians called me Ysis
And the Phoenecians Baal.
I am the sea that girdles the world.
I am the first and I shall be the last.
I am the Serpent of the Ages.
Published in Poet's Scroll, August 1929. Alternative title: Stay Not From Me. Note: not the same poem as Shadows of Dreams.
Stay not from me that veil of dreams that gives
Strange seas and and skies and lands and curious fire,
Black dragons, crimson moons and white desire,
That through the silvery fabric sifts and sieves
Strange shadows, shades and all unmeasured things,
And in the sifting lends them shapes and wings
And makes them known in ways past common knowing—
Red lands, black seas and ivory rivers flowing.
How of the gold we gather in our hands?
It cheers, but shall escape us at the last,
And shall mean less, when this brief day is past,
Than that we gathered on the yellow sands,
The phantom ore we found in Wizard-lands.
Keep not from me my veil of curious dreams
Through which I see the giant things which drink
From mountain-castled rivers—on the brink
Black elephants that woo the fronded streams,
And golden tom-toms pulsing through the dusk,
And yellow stars, black trees and red-eyed cats,
And bales of silk and amber jars of musk,
And opal shrines and tents and vampire bats.
Long highways climbing eastward to the moon,
And caravans of camels lade with spice,
And ancient sword hilts carved with scroll and rune,
And marble queens with eyes of crimson ice.
Uncharted shores where moons of scarlet spray
Break on a Viking’s galley on the sand,
And curtains held by one slim silver band
That float from casements opening on a bay,
And monstrous iron castles, dragon-barred,
And purple cloaks with inlaid gems bestarred.
Long silver tasseled mantles, curious furs,
And camel bells and dawns and golden heat,
And tuneful rattle of the horseman’s spurs
Along some sleeping desert city’s street.
Time strides and all too soon shall I grow old
With still all earth to see, all life to live:
Then come to me, my silver veil, and sieve,
Seas of illusion beached with magic gold.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 15, No. 5 (May 1930).
Alaric and his Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, Geiseric and his Vandals in 455. These dates point to Nial of Ulster as being the legendary
high king Niall Noígíallach (Nial of the Nine Hostages, ancestor of the O’Neills), who seems to have fallen while raiding the Romans in
Alba (Scotland) around 450. Later legends changed Alba to Elpa, thus placing his final battle in the Alps!
Nial of Ulster, welcome home!
What saw you on the road to Rome?—
Legions thronging the fertile plains?
Shouting hordes of the country folks
With the harvest heaped in their groaning wains?
Shepherd piping under the oak?
Laurel chaplet and purple cloak?
Smokes of the feasting coiled on high?
Meadows and fields of the rich, ripe green
Lazing under a cobalt sky?
Brown little villages sleeping between?
What saw you on the road to Rome?
“Crimson tracks in the blackened loam,
“Skeleton trees and a blasted plain,
“A heap of skulls and a child insane,
“Ruin and wreck and the reek of pain
“On the wrack of the road to Rome.”
Nial, what saw you in Rome?—
Purple emperors riding there,
Down aisles with walls like marble foam,
To the golden trumpet’s mystic flare?
Dark-eyed women who bind their hair,
As they bind men’s hearts, with a silver comb?
Spires that cleave through the crystal air,
Arch and altar and amaranth stair?
Nial, what saw you in Rome?
“Broken shrines in the sobbing gloam,
“Bare feet spurning the marble flags,
“Towers fallen and walls digged up,
“A woman in chains and filthy rags.
“Goths in the Forum howled to sup,
“With an emperor’s skull for a drinking-cup.
“The black arch clave to the broken dome.
“The Coliseum invites the bat.
“The Vandal sits where the Caesars sat;
“And the shadows are black on Rome.”
Nial, Nial, now you are home,
Why do you mutter and lonely roam?
“My brain is sick and I know no rest;
“My heart is stone in my frozen breast,
“For the feathers fall from the eagle’s crest
“And the bright sea breaks in foam—
“Kings and kingdoms and empires fall,
“And the mist-black ruin covers them all,
“And the honey of life is a bitter gall
“Since I traveled the road to Rome.”
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 31, No. 4 (April 1938). Part 1 of 5 of the Sonnets Out of Bedlam.
At birth a witch laid on me monstrous spells,
And I have trod strange highroads all my days,
Turning my feet to gray, unholy ways.
I grope for stems of broken asphodels;
High on the rims of bare, fiend-haunted fells,
I follow cloven tracks that lie ablaze;
And ghosts have led me through the moonlight’s haze
To talk with demons in the granite hells.
Seas crash upon dragon-guarded shores,
Bursting in crimson moons of burning spray,
And iron castles open to me their doors,
And serpent-women lure with harp and lay.
The misty waves shake now to phantom oars—
Seek not for me; I sail to meet the day.
Published in The Junto, August 1929. Alternative title: Reuben’s Birthright.
The Black Prince scowled above his lance, and wrath in his hot eyes lay,
“I would rather you rode with the spears of France and not at my side today.
“A man may parry an open blow, but I know not where to fend;
“I would that you were an open foe, instead of a sworn friend.
“You came to me in an hour of need, and your heart I thought I saw;
“But you are one of a rebel breed that knows not king or law.
“You—with your ever smiling face and a black heart under your mail—
“With the haughty strain of the Norman race and the wild, black blood of the Gael.
“Thrice in a night fight’s close-locked gloom my shield by merest chance
“Has turned a sword that thrust like doom—I wot ’twas not of France!
“And in a dust-cloud, blind and red, as we charged the Provence line
“An unseen axe struck Fitzjames dead, who gave his life for mine.
“Had I proofs, your head should fall this day or ever I rode to strife.
“Are you but a wolf to rend and slay, with naught to guide your life?
“No gleam of love in a lady’s eyes, no honor or faith or fame?”
I raised my face to the brooding skies and laughed like a roaring flame.
“I followed the sign of the Geraldine from Meath to the western sea
“Till a careless word that I scarcely heard bred hate in the heart of me.
“Then I lent my sword to the Irish chiefs, for half of my blood is Gael,
“And we cut like a sickle through the sheafs as we harried the lines of the Pale.
“But Dermod O’Connor, wild with wine, called me a dog at heel,
“And I cleft his bosom to the spine and fled to the black O’Neil.
“We harried the chieftains of the south; we shattered the Norman bows.
“We wasted the land from Cork to Louth; we trampled our fallen foes.
“But Conn O’Neill put on me a slight before the Gaelic lords,
“And I betrayed him in the night to the red O’Donnell swords.
“I am no thrall to any man, no vassal to any king.
“I owe no vow to any clan, nor faith to any thing.
“Traitor—but not for fear or gold, but the fire in my own dark brain;
“For the coins I loot from the broken hold I throw to the winds again.
“And I am true to myself alone, through pride and the traitor’s part.
“I would give my life to shield your throne, or rip from your breast, the heart.
“For a look or a word, scarce thought or heard, I follow a fading fire.
“Past bead and bell and the hangman’s cell, like a harp-call of desire.
“I may not see the road I ride for the witch-fire lamps that gleam;
“But phantoms glide at my bridle-side, and I follow a nameless Dream.”
The Black Prince shuddered and shook his head, then crossed himself amain:
“Go, in God’s name, and never,” he said, “ride in my sight again.”
The starlight silvered my bridle-rein; the moonlight burned my lance
As I rode back from the wars again through the pleasant hills of France,
As I rode to tell Lord Amory of the dark Fitzgerald line
If the Black Prince dies, it needs must be by another hand than mine.
Published in American Poet, May 1929.
The Persian slaughtered the Apis Bull;
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
And the brain fermented beneath his skull.
(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)
He rode on the desert raider’s track;
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
No man of his gleaming hosts came back.
And the dust winds drifted sombre and black.
(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)
The eons passed on the desert land;
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
And a stranger trod the shifting sand.
(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)
His idle hand disturbed the dead;
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
Till he found Cambysses’ skull of dread
Whence the frenzied brain so long had fled,
That once held terrible visions red.
(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)
And an asp crawled from the dust inside
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
And the stranger fell and gibbered and died.
(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 11, No. 5 (May 1928).
The dusk was on the mountain
And the stars were dim and frail
When the bats came flying, flying
From the river and the vale
To wheel against the twilight
And sing their witchy tale.
“We were kings of eld!” they chanted,
“Rulers of a world enchanted;
“Every nation of creation
“Owned our lordship over men.
“Diadems of power crowned us,
“Then rose Solomon to confound us,
“Flung his web of magic round us,
“In the forms of beasts he bound us,
“So our rule was broken then.”
Whirling, wheeling into westward,
Fled they in their phantom flight;
Was it but a wing-beat music
Murmured through the star-gemmed night?
Or the singing of a ghost clan
Whispering of forgotten night?
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
The lords of Greenwich sallied forth
The men, also the maids;
The dames had cut and combed their hair,
The men wore theirs in braids.
They came unto a comrade’s room,
They laid on him their hands
Said they, “Oh fiend, oh cringing wretch!
“Behold the traitor stands!”
They punched him thrice upon the nose,
They blacked his gleaming eye;
They nailed his trousers to the wall
And left him there to die.
But people came and cut him down
And gave him other pants.
“And tell us now,” the people said
“How this thing came to chance?”
“Alas for me!” the wretch replied,
“My sinful lust for gold!
“My former friends are down on me—
I wrote a book that sold!”
Published in The Ghost Ocean, 1982.
The sea is grey in the death of day,
Behind me lifts the night.
I’ll flee no more from the ancient shore
Where first I saw the light.
The Saxons come and the Saxons go
With the ebb and flow of the tide;
Their galleys loom, grim shapes of doom,
But here shall I abide.
My castles rust in crimson dust,
Red ruin tossed in the drift—
But the sea is grey, and the wolf’s at bay,
And the ravens circle swift.
Come from the mists of the Northern Sea
Where the smoke blue hazes melt.
Your dead shall lie where here I die,
The last unconquered Celt.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 17, No. 2 (February/March 1931).
I am the thorn in the foot, I am the blur in the sight;
I am the worm at the root, I am the thief in the night.
I am the rat in the wall, the leper that leers at the gate;
I am the ghost in the hall, herald of horror and hate.
I am the rust on the corn, I am the smut on the wheat,
Laughing man’s labor to scorn, weaving a web for his feet.
I am canker and mildew and blight, danger and death and decay;
The rot of the rain by night, the blast of the sun by day.
I warp and wither with drought, I work in the swamp’s foul yeast;
I bring the black plague from the south and the leprosy in from the east.
I rend from the hemlock boughs wine steeped in the petals of dooms;
Where the fat black serpents drowse I gather the Upas blooms.
I have plumbed the northern ice for a spell like frozen lead;
In lost gray fields of rice, I have learned from Mongol dead.
Where a bleak black mountain stands I have looted grisly caves;
I have digged in the desert sands to plunder terrible graves.
Never the sun goes forth, never the moon glows red,
But out of the south or the north, I come with the slavering dead.
I come with hideous spells, black chants and ghastly tunes;
I have looted the hidden hells and plundered the lost black moons.
There was never a king or priest to cheer me by word or look,
There was never a man or beast in the blood-black ways I took.
There were crimson gulfs unplumbed, there were black wings over a sea;
There were pits where mad things drummed, and foaming blasphemy.
There were vast ungodly tombs where slimy monsters dreamed;
There were clouds like blood-drenched plumes where unborn demons screamed.
There were ages dead to Time, and lands lost out of Space;
There were adders in the slime, and a dim unholy Face.
Oh, the heart in my breast turned stone, and the brain froze in my skull—
But I won through, I alone, and poured my chalice full
Of horrors and dooms and spells, black buds and bitter roots—
From the hells beneath the hells, I bring you my deathly fruits.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 15, No. 4 (April 1930). Alternative title: Sang the King of Midian.
These will I give you, Astair: an armlet of frozen gold,
Gods cut from the living rock, and carven gems in an amber crock,
And a purple woven Tyrian smock, and wine from a pirate’s hold.
Kings shall kneel at your feet, Astair, emperors kiss your hand;
Captive girls for your joy shall dance, slim and straight as a striking lance,
Who tremble and bow at your mildest glance and kneel at your least command.
Galleys shall break the crimson seas seeking delights for you;
With silks and silvery fountain gleams I will weave a world that glows and seems
A shimmering mist of rainbow dreams, scarlet and white and blue.
Or is it glory you wish, Astair, the crash and the battle-flame?
The winds shall break on the warship’s sail and Death ride free at my horse’s tail,
Till all the tribes of the earth shall wail at the terror of your name.
I will break the thrones of the world, Astair, and fling them at your feet;
Flame and banners and doom shall fly, and my iron chariots rend the sky,
Whirlwind on whirlwind heaping high, death and a deadly sleet.
Why are you sad and still, Astair, counting my words as naught?
From slave to queen I have raised you high, and yet you stare with a weary eye,
And never the laugh has followed the sigh, since you from your land were brought.
Do you long for the lowing herds, Astair? For the desert’s dawning white?
For the hawk-eyed tribesman’s coarse hard fare, and the brown firm limbs that are hard and bare,
And the eagle’s rocks and the lion’s lair, and the tents of the Israelite?
I have never chained your limbs, Astair; free as the winds that whirl
Go if you wish. The doors are wide, since less to you is an empire’s pride
Than the open lands where the tribesmen ride, wooing the desert girl.
Published in A Song of the Naked Lands, 1973. Originally untitled.
You lolled in gardens where breezes fanned
The blossom’s shivering shard;
But we were bred in a naked land
Where life was bitter hard.
You raped the grapes of their purple soul
For your wine cups brimming high;
We stooped to the dregs of the muddy hole
That was bitter with alkali.
And you grew flabby and round of limb,
Short of nerve and breath;
But we grew rugged and lean and grim
In our naked grip with Death.
Silk was too harsh for your dainty skin,
Red wine too poor for your drought;
We hunted the holes that the rain stood in,
And stripped the wolf for our clout.
Round were your bellies, soft your hand,
Soft with the fat of earth;
Yours was the wealth of a smiling land,
Ours the desert’s dearth.
You sang beneath the locust tree,
Forgetful of hunger and hate:
“It has always been, it will always be!”—
Even then we were at your gate.
You lolled by fountain and golden hall
Until that frenzied morn
When we burst the gates and breached the wall
And cut you down like corn.
We reaped the yield and we plowed the field
With red and dripping shares,
And you could not fight and you could not run,
You could only die like hares.
Grim was the barter, red the trade,
With dripping swords for coins,
And your women screamed in the trampled sand
With bruised and bleeding loins.
Skilled was the brain and skilled the hand
That shaped the stubborn stone,
But the brain spilled on the bloody sand
When iron split the bone.
The hand that traced the gilded frieze,
That scrolled the written page,
It could not turn the driven steel,
Backed by the primal rage.
Of what avail the harp and lute,
Gemmed girdle and purple cloak,
When the dripping axe was smiting home
In the flame and the blinding smoke?
Blood smeared your satin and silk and lace.
You heard your children moan,
And your elders howled in the market place
Where we stripped them skin from bone.
And where your bearded judges sat
And bade men live or die,
A naked slayer roared and waved
A bloody scalp on high.
Over the ruins arched and spired
The billowing smoke cloud waves;
And you who lived when the sword was tired,
You live but as our slaves.
Our hard hands clutch your golden cups,
Our rough feet crush your flowers;
We stable our horses in your halls,
And all your wealth is ours.
We have doffed our wolfskin clouts for silks,
We wear them clumsily,
Our eyes are bleak, our beards unshorn,
Our matted locks stream free.
But our sons will trim their beards and hair,
Don cloaks of crimson hue;
They will take your daughters to their beds,
Till they grow soft as you.
They will trade their freedom for harps and lutes,
Discard the bow and the dart;
They will build a prison of satin and gold,
And call it Culture and Art.
They will lie in the lap of a smiling land,
Till its rusts unman and rot them,
And they scorn their blood, and the calloused hand,
And the fathers who begot them.
But our brothers still dwell in the sun-seared waste
And their sons are hard and lank;
They will hunt the wolf-pack that we chased,
And drink the water we drank.
The hungers we knew they too will know,
The scars of fangs and of briars;
In the rocks where they crouch when the sandstorms blow
They will find the marks of our fires.
They will know the hungers that once we had,
While the stream of centuries runs,
Till they burst from the desert, hunger-mad,
To slaughter our slothful sons.
Published in The Howard Collector, #1 (Summer 1961). Shares lines with The Grim Land.
Sonora to Del Rio is a hundred barren miles
Where the sotol weave and shimmer in the sun—
Like a host of swaying serpents straying down the bare defiles
When the silver, scarlet webs of dawn are spun.
There are little ’dobe ranchoes, brooding far along the sky
On the sullen, dreary bosoms of the hills.
Not a wolf to break the quiet, not a single bird to fly;
Where the silence is so utter that it thrills.
Maybe, in the heat of evening, comes a wind from Mexico
Laden with the heat of seven Hells,
And the rattler in the yucca and the buzzard dark and slow
Hear and understand the grisly tales it tells.
Gaunt and stark and bare and mocking rise the everlasting cliffs
Like a row of sullen giants carved of stone,
Till the traveler, mazed with silence, thinks to look at hieroglyphs,
Thinks to see a carven pharaoh on his throne.
And the road goes on forever, o’er the barren hill forever,
And there’s little to hint of flowing wine—
But beyond the hills and sotol there’s a mellow curving river
And a land of sun and mellow wine.
Published in The Junto, August 1929, a literary travelogue circulated from member to member on a mailing list from 1928 to 1930. Alternate title: The Road to Rest.
I will rise some day when the day is done
And the stars begin to quiver;
I will follow the road of the setting sun
Till I come to a dreaming river.
I am weary now of the world and vow
Of the winds and the winter weather;
I’ll reel through a few more years somehow,
Then I’ll quite them altogether.
I’ll go to a girl that once I knew
And I will not swerve or err,
And I care not if she be false or true
For I am not true to her.
Her eyes are fierce and her skin is brown
And her wild blood hotly races,
But it’s little I care if she does not frown
At any man’s embraces.
Should I ask for a love none may invade?
Is she more or less than human?
Do I ask for more, who have betrayed
Man, devil, god and woman?
Enough for me if she has of me
A bamboo hut she’ll share,
And enough tequila to set me free
From the ghosts that leer and stare.
I’ll lie all day in a sodden sleep
Through days without name or number,
With only the wind in the sky’s blue deep
To haunt my unshaken slumber.
And I’ll lie by night in the star-roofed hut
Forgetful and quiet hearted,
Till she comes with her burning eyes half shut
And her red lips hot and parted.
The past is flown when the cup is full,
And there is no chain for linking
And any woman is beautiful
When a man is blind with drinking.
Life is a lie that cuts like a knife
With its sorrow and fading blisses;
I’ll go to a girl who asks naught of life
Save wine and a drunkard’s kisses.
No man shall know my race or name,
Or my past sun-ripe or rotten,
Till I travel the road by which I came,
Forgetting and soon forgotten.
Published in Ariel: The Book of Fantasy, Vol. 1 (Autumn 1976). Tentative title.
Eons before Atlantean days in the time of the world’s black dawn,
Strange were the kings and grim the deeds that the pallid moon looked on.
When the great black cities split the stars and strange prows broke the tide,
And smoke went up from ghastly shrines where writhing victims died.
Black magic raised its serpent head, and all things foul and banned,
Till an angry God hurled up the sea against the shuddering land.
And the grisly kings they read their doom in the wind and the rising brine,
And they set a pillar on a hill for a symbol and a sign.
Black shrine and hall and carven wall sank to eternal sleep,
And dawn looked down on a silent world and the blue unbroken deep.
Now men go forth in their daily ways and they reck not of the feel
Of the veil that crushed, so long ago, the world beneath its heel.
But deep in the seaweed-haunted halls in the green unlighted deep,
Inhuman kings await the day that shall break their chains of sleep.
And far in a grim untrodden land on a jungle-girded hill,
A pillar stands like a sign of Fate, in subtle warning still.
Carved in its blind black face of stone a fearful unknown rune
Leers in the glare of the tropic sun and the cold of the leprous moon.
And it shall stand for a symbol mute that men are weak and blind,
Till Hell roars up from the black abyss and horror swoops behind.
For this is the screed upon the shaft, oh, pallid sons of men:
“We that were lords of all the earth, shall rise and rule again.”
And dark is the doom of the tribes of earth, that hour wild and red,
When the ages give their secrets up and the sea gives up its dead.
Published in The Daniel Baker Collegian, 25 May 1926, the newspaper of Daniel Baker College of Brownwood.
Heads! Heads! Heads!
Bounce on the cobble stones.
Glitter of scarlets and flame of reds
Crimson the road that Freedom treads,
We’re rearing a fane of bones.
And bare feet
Weave their beat
Down the red reeking street.
Hell holds sway.
Slay! Slay!
Hate goes bellowing through the land,
Crimson-hued is my gleaming brand.
Kill! Kill! And my lips a-thrill
With hot kisses snatched in the frenzied whirl—
Raped from the lips of a noble girl.
And her brother’s blood on my hand.
Rage, lust, passion-hot.
Prance, dance, you sans culotte.
This is your hour, the height of your power,
Culture, decency forgot.
Blood! Blood! The red gleams preen
On yon fair maid the guillotine!
Vive, vive la guillotine!
Hate and slaughter, that is all;
Blood to shed and heads to fall.
Love is lust and good is lies,
Satan rides the eery skies.
Dance and sway
Whirl away
Meet and kiss, it is bliss
But to slay!
All the world’s a gore-rimmed sea, lo, the devil laughs with glee.
Come and dance then, you with me, come and caper wild and free.
With red blood those fires are lit,
Hades’ smoke is tinged with it.
And the very skies that soar
Are encrimsoned as with gore—
Yon was once a baron’s head,
Now it decks a pike instead.
I salute ye, with my sword.
Here’s to you, m’sieu le lord.
Much you had of wondrous wine,
Ermine coats and horses fine,
Luscious lips of dainty girls,
Snowy bosoms, gold and pearls,
None so haughty as your sneer—
Now you ride a common’s spear.
Here’s to you! In hell you burn.
I am on the upward turn
Of the slow revolving Wheel
With my reign of blood and steel.
O’er my prostrate head ye strode;
On my shoulder bent ye rode.
You the whip-man, I the clown
Till I rose to tread you down.
They will rise to trample me—
For the moment I am free.
Through the ribs the winds may drone
Now the world is all mine own.
Mine to lust, to rage, to dance!
Vive la Freedom! Vive la France!
Published in Singers in the Shadows, 1970.
There stands, close by a dim, wolf-haunted wood,
A tavern like a monster, brooding thing.
About its sullen gables no birds sing.
Oft a lone traveller, when the moon is blood,
Lights from his horse in quest of sleep and meal.
His footfalls fade within and sound no more;
He comes not forth; but from a secret door
Bearing a grisly burden, shadows steal.
By day, ’neath trees whose silent, green leaves glisten,
The tavern crouches, hating day and light.
A lurking vampire, terrible and lean;
Sometimes behind its windows may be seen
Vague leprous faces, haggard, fungus-white,
That peer and start and ever seem to listen.
Published in The Cross Plains Review, 18 June 1937.
Something tapped me on the shoulder
Something whispered, “Come with me,
“Leave the world of men behind you,
“Come where care may never find you
“Come and follow, let me bind you
“Where, in that dark, silent sea,
“Tempest of the world ne’er rages;
“There to dream away the ages,
“Heedless of Time’s turning pages,
“Only, come with me.”
“Who are you?” I asked the phantom.
“I am rest from Hate and Pride.
“I am friend to king and beggar,
“I am Alpha and Omega,
“I was councilor to Hagar
“But men call me suicide.”
I was weary of tide breasting,
Weary of the world’s behesting,
And I lusted for the resting
As a lover for his bride.
And my soul tugged at its moorings
And it whispered, “Set me free.
“I am weary of this battle,
“Of this world of human cattle,
“All this dreary noise and prattle.
“This you owe to me.”
Long I sat and long I pondered,
On the life that I had squandered,
O’er the paths that I had wandered
Never free.
In the shadow panorama
Passed life’s struggles and its fray.
And my soul tugged with new vigor,
Huger grew the phantom’s figure,
As I slowly tugged the trigger,
Saw the world fade swift away.
Through the fogs old Time came striding,
Radiant clouds were ’bout me riding,
As my soul went gliding, gliding,
From the shadow into day.
Published in Omniumgathum, 1976. Alternative title: To a Woman [3].
Thus in my mood I love you
In the drum of my heart’s fast beat,
In the lure of the skies above you
And the earth beneath your feet.
Now I can lift and crown you
With the moon’s white empery,
Now I can crush and drown you
In my passion’s misty sea.
I can swing you high and higher
Than any man of earth,
Draw you through stars and fire
To lands of the ultimate birth.
Were I like this forever
You’d only too little to give,
But here tonight we sever
For life loves life to live.
And the higher a man may travel
The lower may he fall
And the skein that I must unravel
It was never meant for all.
And what do you know of glory,
Of the heights that I have trod,
Of the shadows grim and hoary
That hide my face from God!
Would you understand my story,
My torments and my hopes,
Or the red dark Purgatory
Where my soul in horror gropes!
Now I am man and lover
Rising with you at side
To peaks where the splendors hover—
But drifting with the tide.
And the tide? It is mine to shake it,
To battle the winds and spray,
To batter the tide and break it
Or batter my heart away.
So I leave you—that you never
The grim day have to face
When I would be gone forever
And a stranger in my place.
Tonight, tonight we sever
For my race is my own race.
Published in Contemporary Verse, September 1929.
I am weary of birth and battle,
Seasons and Time and tide,
Of the ocean’s empty rattle.
And the woman at my side.
I am weary of pain and revel,
And eyes that glitter or weep;
I will sell my soul to the Devil
For a thousand years of sleep.
Then never a dream shall haunt me,
And never a star shall rise,
Nor a shadow come to daunt me
In the blackness over my eyes.
There shall be no name or number
Of the seasons over me;
I shall know the tides of slumber
As a sunken ship, the sea.
And when I shall wake hereafter,
And the Devil comes for his gain,
I will crush him with crimson laughter
And turn to my sleep again.
Published in The Howard Collector, Summer 1964. Alternative title: Timur-il-lang.
The warm wind blows through the waving grain—
Where are the glories of Tamerlane?
The nations stood up, ripe and tall—
He was the sickle that reaped them all.
But the sickle shatters and leaves no trace—
And the grain grows green on the desert’s face.
Published in Modern American Poetry, 1933.
Though fathoms deep you sink me in the mould,
Locked in with thick-lapped lead and bolted wood,
Yet rest not easy in your lover’s arms;
Let him beware to stand where I have stood.
I shall not fail to burst my ebon case,
And thrust aside the clods with fingers red:
Your blood shall turn to ice to see my face
Look from the shadows on your midnight bed.
To face the dead, he, too, shall wake in vain,
My fingers at his throat, your scream his knell;
He will not see me tear you from your bed,
And drag you by your golden hair to Hell.
Published in The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1: 1923-1929, June 2007.
Bide by the fluted iron walls
Take ye a serving wench to wife;
Drown in the pot the bugle’s calls,
Trade your spear for a peddler’s knife.
Turn to the vendor’s paltry strife,
Gird ye round with doors and bars
Safely snore in the lap of Life—
I must follow the restless stars.
Wait at the doors of your master’s halls
—For the faithful server, boards are rife—
Make no oath when the whip-lash falls—
Hark to the counsel of your wife;
Trade your harp for a peddler’s fife.
But gods, the spray and the plunging spars!
Here is my heart—in the heart of Life
And I must follow the restless stars
Envoi
King, there are stallions in golden stalls,
But bars of sapphire are only bars!
Bide in peace in the high safe halls—
I must follow the restless stars.
Published in The Last of the Trunk Och Brev I Urval, March 2007.
Toil, cares, annoyances all fade away;
I care not who may run for President.
I drowse and swing my rum the live-long day,
And watch the shallops skimming o’er the bay.
Published in The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 2: 1930-1932, October 2007.
Headlock, hammerlock, toss him on his bean again,
Jump on his belly and boot him in the hips,
Clamp the scissors on his neck
and choke him till he’s green again
Get the fans wild-eyed, with froth on their lips.
Barlock, body-slam, nibble on his ears again—
Its just like eating cabbage—and kick him in the groin,
Butt him in the belly, that brings the cheers again,
The fans want a run for their hard-spent coin.
Flying-mare, toe-hold, twist his neck around again,
Wrap his legs around his waist and tie them in a knot,
Stamp in his mouth so his teeth cannot be found again,
The fans paid their money so make it good and hot.
Stranglehold, leg-split, jerk his knee-caps loose again,
Crack his ribs and break his arms, leave him life-long lame,
Send him out on a shutter—then listen to the boos again,
The kind fans howling that the battle was too tame.
Published in The Best Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, 2008.
Up, John Kane, the grey night’s falling;
The sun’s sunk in blood and the fog comes crawling;
From hillside to hill the grey wolves are calling;
Will ye come, will ye come, John Kane?
What of the oath that you swore by the river
Where the black shadows lurk and the sun comes never,
And a Shape in the shadows wags its grisly head forever?
You swore by the blood-crust that stained your dagger,
By the haunted woods where hoofed feet swagger,
And under grisly burdens misshapen creatures stagger.
Up, John Kane, and cease your quaking!
You have made the pact which has no breaking,
And your brothers are eager their thirst to be slaking.
Up, John Kane! Why cringe there, and cower?
The pact was sealed with the dark blood-flower;
Glut now your fill in the werewolf’s hour!
Fear not the night nor the shadows that play there;
Soundless and sure shall your bare feet stray there;
Strong shall your teeth be, to rend and to slay there.
Up, John Kane, the thick night’s falling;
Up from the valleys the white fog’s crawling;
Your four-footed brothers from the hills are calling:
Will ye come, will ye come, John Kane?
Published in The Howard Collector, #16 (Spring 1972).
I cannot believe in a paradise
Glorious, undefiled,
For gates all scrolled and streets of gold
Are tales for a dreaming child.
I am too lost for shame
That it moves me unto mirth,
But I can vision a Hell of flame
For I have lived on earth.
Published in The Fantasy Fan, Vol. 2, No. 1 (September 1934). Alternative titles: A Drum Begins to Throb; Out of the Deep. Part 1 of 5 of the Voices of the Night cycle.
The blind black shadows reach inhuman arms
To draw me into darkness once again;
The brooding night wind hints of nameless harms,
And down the shadowed hill a vague refrain
Bears half-remembered ghosts to haunt my soul,
Like far-off neighing of the nightmare’s foal.
But let me fix my phantom-shadowed eyes
Hard on the stars — pale points of silver light—
Here is the borderland — here reason lies—
There, vision, gryphons, Nothing, and the Night.
Down, down, red spectres, down, and rack me not!
Out, wolves of Hell! Oh God, my pulses thrum;
The night grows fierce and blind and red and hot,
And nearer still a frim insistent drum.
I will not look into the shadows — No!
The star shall grip and hold my frantic gaze—
But even in the stars black visions grow,
And dragons writhe with iron eyes ablaze.
Oh Gods that raised my blindness with your curse,
And let me see the horrid shapes behind
All outward veils that cloak the universe,
The loathsome demon-spells that bind and blind,
Since even the stars are noisome, foul and fell,
Let me glut deep with memory dreams of hell.
Published in A Robert E. Howard Memorial: June 13-15, 1986, 1986.
I died in sin and forthwith went to Hell;
I made myself at home upon the coals
Where seas of flame break on the cinder shoals.
Till Satan came and said with angry yell,
“You there—divulge what route by which you fell.”
“I spent my youth among the flowing bowls,
“Wasted my life with women of dark souls,
“Died brothel-fighting—drunk on muscatel.”
Said he, “My friend, you’ve been directed wrong:
“You’ve naught to recommend you for our feasts—
“Like factory owners, brokers, elders, priests;
“The air for you! This place is for the strong!”
Then as I pondered, minded to rebel,
He laughed and forthwith kicked me out of Hell.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 30, No. 4 (October 1937).
Small poets sing of little, foolish things,
As more befitting to a shallow brain
That dreams not of pre-Atlantean kings,
Nor launches on that dark uncharted Main
That holds grim islands and unholy tides,
Where many a black mysterious secret hides.
True rime concerns her not with bursting buds,
The chirping bird, the lifting of the rose—
Save ebon blooms that swell in ghastly woods,
And that grim, voiceless bird that ever broods
Where through black boughs a wind of horror blows.
Oh, little singers, what know you of those
Ungodly, slimy shapes that glide and crawl
Out of unreckoned gulfs when midnights fall,
To haunt a poet’s slumbering, and close
Against his eyes thrust up their hissing head,
And mock him with their eyes so serpent-red?
Conceived and bred in blackened pits of hell,
The poems come that set the stars on fire;
Born of black maggots writhing in a shell
Men call a poet’s skull—an iron bell
Filled up with burning mist and golden mire.
The royal purple is a moldy shroud;
The laurel crown is cypress fixed with thorns;
The sword of fame, a sickle notched and dull;
The face of beauty is a grinning skull;
And ever in their souls’ red caverns loud
The rattle of cloven hoofs and horns.
The poets know that justice is a lie,
That good and light are baubles filled with dust—
This world’s slave-market where swine sell and buy,
This shambles where the howling cattle die,
Has blinded not their eyes with lies and lust.
Published in Kadath, No. 1 (1974).
My ruthless hands still clutch at life—
Still like a shoreless sea
My soul beats on in rage and strife.
You may not shackle me.
My leopard eyes are still untamed,
They hold a darksome light—
A fierce and brooding gleam unnamed
That pierced primeval night.
Rear mighty temples to your god—
I lurk where shadows sway,
Till, when your drowsy guards shall nod
To leap and rend and slay.
For I would hurl your cities down
And I would break your shrines
And give the site of every town
To thistles and to vines.
Higher the walls of Nineveh
And prouder Babel’s spires—
I bellowed from the desert way—
They crumbled in my fires.
For all the works of cultured man
Must fare and fade and fall.
I am the Dark Barbarian
That towers over all.
Published in Weird Tales, Vol. 30, No. 6 (December 1937).
And so his boyhood wandered into youth,
And still the hazes thickened round his head,
And red, lascivious nightmares shared his bed
And fantasies with greedy claw and tooth
Burrowed into the secret parts of him—
Gigantic, bestial and misshapen paws
Gloatingly fumbled each white youthful limb,
And shadows lurked with scarlet gaping jaws.
Deeper and deeper in a twisting maze
Of monstrous shadows, shot with red and black,
Or gray as dull decay and rainy days,
He stumbled onward. Ever at his back
He heard the lecherous laughter of the ghouls.
Under the fungoid trees lay stagnant pools
Wherein he sometimes plunged up to his waist
And shrieked and scrambled out with loathing haste,
Feeling unnumbered slimy fingers press
His shrinking flesh with evil, dank caress.
Life was a cesspool of obscenity—
He saw through eyes accursed with unveiled sight—
Where Lust ran rampant through a screaming Night
And black-faced swine roared from the Devil’s styes;
Where grinning corpses, fiend-inhabited,
Walked through the world with taloned hands outspread;
Where beast and monster swaggered side by side,
And unseen demons strummed a maddening tune;
And naked witches, young and brazen-eyed,
Flaunted their buttocks to a lustful moon.
Rank, shambling devils chased him night on night,
And caught and bore him to a flaming hall,
Where lambent in the flaring crimson light
A thousand long-tongued faces lined the wall.
And there they flung him, naked and a-sprawl
Before a great dark woman’s ebon throne.
How dark, inhuman, strange, her deep eyes shone!
Published in The Howard Collector, Summer 1964.
You have built a world of paper and wood,
Culture and cult and lies;
Has the cobra altered beneath his hood,
Or the fire in the tiger’s eyes?
You have turned from valley and hill and flood,
You have set yourselves apart,
Forgetting the earth that feeds the blood
And the talon that finds the heart.
You boast you have stilled the lustful call
Of the black ancestral ape,
But Life, the tigress that bore you all,
Has never changed her shape.
And a strange shape comes to your faery mead,
With a fixed black simian frown,
But you will not know and you will not heed
Till your towers come tumbling down.