The Motes

Read "The Motes" at The Eldritch Dark:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/352/the-motes

The version of this poem at The Eldritch Dark has a typo which would make it seem that Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) tried to rhyme a word with itself; in reality, he did not do that, so here's the second stanza with the corrected word in the third line marked in bold:


Each had its swift and tiny noon;
In orbit-streams I marked them flit,
Successively revealed and lit.
The sunlight paled and shifted soon.


"The Motes" is a minor poem from CAS' body of poetry, but one could almost think of it as a something of a palate cleanser, a gentle break from the bolder verses of soaring imagination and boundless scope that he is best known for.  This poem reminds us that CAS' imagination could encompass the cosmos while not missing the small details of daily life that, if noticed and contemplated, make all the difference to one's lived experience.