Ephemera

Here's another poem by Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) that was unpublished in his lifetime, so let's start with the poem itself:


We are but tiny insects of a day
That on a whirling planet toil and play--
To what end no one seems to know--till creep
We one by one aside, and fall asleep.


Short and simple, but a grim and effective little portrait of human beings as the proverbial ants crawling on the surface of the blue orb suspended in space.  The title itself seems to be the cruelest notion of all - we poor humans portrayed as a trivial phenomenon of little interest in the grand scheme of things.