The Recluse (Cook)/After Armageddon
After Armageddon
By Clark Ashton Smith
God walks lightly in the gardens of a cold, dark star,
Knowing not the dust that gathers in His garments’ fold;
God signs Him with the clay, marks Him with the mould,
Walking in the fields unsunned of a sad, lost war
In a star long cold.
God treads brightly where the bones of unknown things lie,
Pale with His splendour as the frost in a moon-bleached place;
God sees the tombs by the light of His face,
He shudders at the runes writ thereon, and His shadow on the sky
Is the shudder of space.
God talks briefly with His armies of the tomb-born worm,
God holds parley with the grey worm and pale, avid moth:
Their mouths have eaten all, but the worm is wroth
With a dark hunger still, and he murmurs harm
With the murmuring moth.
God turns Him heavenward in haste from a death-dark star,
But His robes are assoilèd by the dust of unknown things dead;
The grey worm follows creeping, and the pale moth has fed,
Couched in a secret golden fold of His broad-trained cimar,
Like a doom unsaid.