Classic Poem

Where open skies, undraped with cloud, lie high above the land,
And flat, unmeasured miles sink down a haze of sunwarmed sand,
There, careless of the passing years, of every wind that blows,
Half-sister to the rocks around, a grey Karroo-bush grows.

In scarce-felt tides the seasons pass, sure, regular, and slow;
The vasty nights all set with stars that peer, and flash, and glow;
An echo of a thunderstorm, a sudden rush of rain,
A cloth of flowers: then the sun draws back his wrath again.

So goes the spring, and life has passed, the earth has borne her yield,
The red-backed veld appears once more, a vast inverted shield;
The muddy vleis shrink step by step, the quail go on their quest,
The spring-buck gather to migrate, the whole land sinks to rest.

The grey Karroo-bush ponders then: the mighty sky above,
The little grains of sand below, — the rocks, — a passing dove,
The lisping of the highyeld breeze, a vulture in the blue,
But more than these — far more than these — the Hero that she knew.

Broad-browed, fierce-eyed, and tense with life, about her feet he lay
And waited in the aching sun his enemy to slay,
And, seizing opportunity, sent forth the questing lead
To solve the unending problem, augment the many dead.

Yea, probing for a brother's life in every street he saw,
Heedless of pity, blind to pain, in savage joy of war,
He slew the man he might have loved, robbed the sore-needing soil
Of those who'd won, and tried to hold, the guerdon of long toil.

Yet that he strove in evil strife was nought at all to her —
He was the type of All Beyond; of things that do occur
Outside the outer rim of earth that bounds the great Karroo —
Motley of things that matter not, medley of things that do.

He was the soul of throbbing towns, the breath of pulsing life,
The savage incarnation of a world of work and strife;
Passionate, full of purpose; and then — how still he lay ...
Till, when the distant guns had ceased, they carried him away.

Silent and stiff, by fading light, they carried him away
Beyond the outer sentry-beats, beyond the muddied vlei,
Where, choked with heat and foul with dust, the men and horses drank,
To bury there with other dead by the dry-river bank.

No spoor remained to show the trail by which his steps had passed,
(The secret shot alone might know which bourne was his at last),
And to the brooding bush no sign revealed where he had gone,
But at her foot a stain of blood blackened, and dried, and shone.

Where open skies, undraped with cloud, lie high above the land,
And flat, unmeasured miles sink down a haze of sunwarmed sand;
There, careless of the passing years, of every wind that blows,
Half-sister to the rocks around, a grey Karroo-bush grows.