BEETHOVEN

By ROBERT S. CARR

A few weird chords of music,
Riding the midnight winds,
Snatched my mind away from me
And out where the dawn begins.
My mind came back with fantasies,
Like cobwebs' gray festoons,
Looped across my consciousness
To sing of gibbous moons;
Of new graves seen by lightning,
And skulls in the seashore's sand;
Of black ghouls' lairs in gloomy woods
Where crumbling tombstones stand;
Of tortured stars that faint and fall
A billion miles through space;
Of moaning ghosts in haunted caves,
And snakes with maidens' face.
When the weird chords ceased, my mind came back,
Like a vampire flapping home
In the dim dawn light from a ghastly night,
No more, I hope, to roam.