Moon Mockery by Robert E. Howard

“Moon Mockery” is a short poem that debuted in the April 1929 issue of Weird Tales. It has also appeared in a number of anthologies including Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre (1947) and The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard (2009).

 

About Robert E. Howard

Robert Ervin Howard was an American writer of pulp fiction. Often considered to be the man who began the sword and sorcery subgenre, Howard was the creator of Conan the Barbarian.

Howard began writing fiction when he was just nine years old. In December 1922, aged 16, his work began paying off when The Tattler (Brownwood High School newspaper) printed two of his stories: “‘Golden Hope Christmas” and “West is West”. Then, in 1924, after years of having his stories rejected by Weird Tales, he made his first sale to the magazine with a caveman story called “Spear and Fang”. This marked the start of Howard’s career as a pulp fiction writer and Weird Tales subsequently became one of his main outlets for weird fiction.

 

Moon Mockery

By Robert E. Howard

(Online Text)

I walked in Tara’s Wood one summer night,
And saw, amid the still, star-haunted skies,
A slender moon in silver mist arise,
And hover on the hill as if in fright.
Burning, I seized her veil and held her tight:
An instant all her glow was in my eyes;
Then she was gone, swift as a white bird flies,
And I went down the hill in opal light.

And soon I was aware, as down I came,
That all was strange and new on every side;
Strange people went about me to and fro,
And when I spoke with trembling mine own name
They turned away, but one man said: “He died
In Tara Wood, a hundred years ago.”

 

Robert E. Howard (1906 – 1936)