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Neptune’s Neighbors

by Cristel Hastings

published in WEIRD TALES, April 1929

In shadowed glens they wait beneath the waves,

Darting like furtive arrows through the gloom,

Haunting the ghostly hulls that lie at rest—

Old slanting decks that settled to their doom.

Strange shapes are here, patrolling somber depths

Peering through portholes that once framed the sun,

Nosing the keels that lie in sanded graves—

Good ships that Neptune gambled for—and won.

The silent avenues on ocean floors

Are harbor for dead dreams and sodden hulls

Where bells are mute and footsteps sound no more

On ships that once raced convoys of gray gulls.

No more will pennants whip the flying breeze

Nor winds go roaring down a funnel’s throat,

For here they lie, of worlds something apart,

Forgotten by all things that are afloat.