Walter Murdoch (1874–1970). The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse. 1918.
By Arthur Adams135 . Written in Australia
T
Whipped by his glances truculent
The earth lies quivering and cowed.
My heart is hot with discontent:
I hate this haggard continent.
A lone land calls to her children free:
My own land holding her arms to me—
But oh, the long loping leagues of sea.
No breeze comes leaping, naked, rude,
Adown the narrow, high-walled street;
Upon the night thick perfumes brood:
The evening oozes lassitude.
Swept in a tide that ne’er abates,
The riotous breezes tumble down;
My heart looks home, looks home where waits
The Windy City of the Straits!
Across its waste has thinly strayed
A tattered host of eucalypt
From whose gaunt uniform is made
A ragged penury of shade.
A mantle thick—save where a peak
Shows his grim teeth a-snarl—and through
The filtered coolness creek and creek,
Tangled in ferns, in whispers speak.
And brimming rivers proudly force
Their ice-cold tides. Here, like a scar,
Dry-lipped, a withered water-course
Crawls from a long-forgotten source.
This listless girl, in whose dark hair
A starry red hibiscus burns;
Her pallid cheeks are like a pair
Of nuns, bloom-ravished, yet so fair.
In her wan face; swift passions brim
In those brown eyes too soft for blame;
Her form is sinuous and slim—
That lyric line of breast and limb!
Whose cheeks with Winter’s kisses smart—
The flushing petals of a rose.
Of earth and sun she is a part;
Her brow is Greek and Greek her heart.
Her heart no weakly one to charm;
Robust and fragrant as the rain,
The dark bush soothed her with his balm,
The mountains gave her of their calm.
Her radiant eyes, her brow benign,
She is the peerless queen of all—
The maid, the country, that I shrine
In this far-banished heart of mine!
A lone land waits with a hope serene—
My own land calls like a prisoner queen—
But oh, the long loping leagues between!