Now as the twilight’s doubtful interval
Closes with night’s accomplished certainty,
A wizard wind goes crying eerily,
And on the wold misshapen shadows crawl,
Miming the trees, whose voices climb and fall,
Imploring, in Sabbatic ecstacy,
The sky where vapor-mounted phantoms flee
From the scythed moon impendent over all.
Twin veils of covering cloud and silence, thrown
Across the movement and the sound of things,
Make blank the night, till in the broken west
The moon’s ensanguined blade awhile is shown….
The night grows whole again….The shadows rest,
Gathered beneath a greater shadow’s wings.
—Clark Ashton Smith, 1912
Because, sometimes you just want to.
This is public domain, as is a lot of Smith’s other stuff, which you can read at WikiSource, or at the Smith fan site named, appropriately enough, The Eldritch Dark. (While the text is public domain, I did gank the photo from Rachel In Madagascar.)
