The Medusa Of The Skies

Haggard as if resurgent from a tomb,

The moon uprears her ghastly, shrunken head,

Crowned with such light as flares upon the dead

From pallid skies more death-like than the gloom.

Now fall her beams till slope and plain assume

The whiteness of a land whence life is fled;

And shadows that a sepulcher might shed

Move livid as the stealthy hands of doom.

O'er rigid hills and valleys locked and mute,

A pallor steals as of a world made still

When Death, that erst had crept, stands absolute -

An earth now frozen fast by power of eyes

That malefice and purposed silence fill,

The gaze of that Medusa of the skies.