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Forbidden Magic

From Wikisource
Forbidden Magic (1929)
by Robert Ervin Howard

First published in Weird Tales, July 1929

8219Forbidden Magic1929Robert Ervin Howard

There came to me a Man one summer night,
When all the world lay silent in the stars,
And moonlight crossed my room with ghostly bars.
He 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 wispy white.

Around the world the sighing of the loon
Shook misty lakes beneath the false-dawn’s gleams;
Rose tinted shone the sky-line’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.

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.


The longest-living author of this work died in 1936, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 88 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.

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