Not Theirs The Cypress-Arch Poem by Clark Ashton Smith

Dream not the dead will wait,
Slow-crumbling in the allotted ground,
Nor rise except to some sonorous trump
And scaring splendors of the doomsday sun:
They rise, they gather about us now,
Crowding the quiet day.

To us, entombed in time,
Asleep within a vaster vault,
They use a speech we seem not to have known,
Yet guide us like sleep-walkers to and fro—
By those forgotten voices drawn
With secret tacit guile.

Not theirs the cypress-arch,
The sexton's haunt, the hallowed stones,
The charnel morris stilled by chanticleer:
Dark demons, through the forum and the street
They move, and we, their fleshly ghosts,
Like driven demoniacs are.