Clark Ashton Smith

January 13, 1893 – August 14, 1961

For An Antique Lyre

Still wanting you, perchance
How vainly love had waited,
An autumn faun belated
For whom the leaves like spectral dryads dance.

And time perhaps had run
A somber, songless river
Whence no nymph rises ever
With limbs that flash to lotus in the sun.

And happiness had been
A siren singing only
On shores unsought and lonely
Where Vesper falls to some untraveled visne.

And joy had tarried still,
A sleeping Venus hidden
In sunless halls forbidden
Within her undiscovered hollow hill.
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