Next Year's Halloween Post

Above is the unofficial winner of our slack Halloween costume contest, a zombie offering up slices of his brain. He wins every year, of course. I had hoped to post the old H.P. Lovecraft heebie-jeebie well before the party Saturday night, then before bringing the kiddles out trick-or-treating Sunday night and bringing them back loaded to the pumpkin tops (Cousin Brady: "This is too heavy! Help, Daddy, I can't carry it any further! Cousin Daddy: "It's your candy, you took it from those people, and you can either carry it home or you can leave it here." Silence...then the sound of a plastic pumpkin bottom scraping and bumping across sidewalk.) Anyhow, here goes Lovecraft's 'Halloween in a Suburb:'

The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
And the harpies of upper air,
That flutter and laugh and stare.

For the village dead to the moon outspread
Never shone in the sunset's gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
Where the rivers of madness stream
Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.


A chill wind weaves through the rows of sheaves
In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
For harvests that fly and fail.

Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral power
Spreads sleep o'er the cosmic throne,
And looses the vast unknown.

So here again stretch the vale and plain
That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
Sprung out of the tomb's black maw
To shake all the world with awe.

And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,
Shall some day be with the rest,
And brood with the shades unblest.

Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
Of horror and death are penned,
For the hounds of Time to rend.