‘Where the Shadows Sleep’
Ghost Dancers by Robert E. Howard, reading from pages 19-20 of A Word from the Outer Dark
© 2017 James LaFond
AUG/27/17
“Night has come over ridge and hill
Where the Badlands starkly lie
Like the tortured fane of a god insane
That mocks the brooding sky.”
Howard continues in seven more haunting four-line verses, dedicated to the passing of a great race. Here Howard’s use of the term race, as linked with culture and bloodline equally, rather than as our own zoological designations that all Amerindians, Asians, whites, etc., are of the same race, brings the reader much closer to the land in terms of how it shapes a folk.
Ghost Dancers is near my favorite Howard poem.
If you are ever in Cross Plains, Texas, stop in to the Robert E. Howard Museum and buy a copy of A Word from the Outer Dark.
orphan nation
time & cosmos
dark, distant futures
advent america
the gods of boxing
logic of force
triumph
into leviathan’s maw
the year the world took the z-pill
hate
beasts of aryas
predation
fanatic
sorcerer!
menthol rampage
america the brutal
the sunset saga complete
night city
under the god of things
fiction anthology one
on combat
taboo you
songs of aryas
book of nightmares
when you're food
logic of steel
thriving in bad places
son of a lesser god
honor among men
solo boxing
ranger?
cracker-boy
sons of aryas
z-pill forever
let the world fend for itself
your trojan whorse
broken dance
the first boxers
on the overton railroad
song of the secret gardener
the greatest boxer
within leviathan’s craw
winter of a fighting life
wife—
uncle satan
all-power-fighting
the combat space
the lesser angels of our nature
fate
by the wine dark sea
masculine axis
blue eyed daughter of zeus
the fighting edge
the greatest lie ever sold
barbarism versus civilization