THE DEAD WORLD

I dreamed I stood atop a craggy verge And scanned long miles of dreary, jumbled waste That stretched, sharp-etched in airless, frozen surge Beneath the sable, star-strewn vault it faced. Black empty mouths of craters, grim and cold, Yawned bottomless, abysmal pits of slag Amid the desert stretching fold on fold To distant jagged peak and sharp-thrust crag. The desolation flooded through my soul— No living thing relieved the dismal rifts Of long-past cataclysms; the bleak roll Of upflung ridge and tangled lava drifts. It was as if a Titan band had played With this dead world when it was young and fair, And tired of the sport when they had made A ruin and a wreckage past repair. The cold of outer voids lay like a blight Of cosmic hate across the planet's face; And from the riven features I took flight To seek relief in fairer realms of space.