 |
The love of
field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered
woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love
of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I
know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I
love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of
ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding
rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her
jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown
land for me!
A stark white ring-barked forest
All
tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The
hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the
brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the
tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.
Core of my
heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at
heart, around us,
We see the cattle die -
But then the
grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming
of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.
Core of my
heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood
and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold -
Over
the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy
veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.
An
opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land -
All you
who have not loved her,
You will not understand -
Though
earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know
to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.
Dorothea
Mackellar | | |
