Classic Poem

Not locomotive-engines, snorting dragons
Belching black smoke, I sing, but tented wagons:
Wagons that like the battered caravels
Of Christopher Columbus by their spells
Wrested the unknown from its secret cells;
Wagons that conquered plain and mountain-belt—
Cradles that rocked the Children of the Veld
Into a nation stubborn strong and hard,
Narrow, suspicious, slow to give regard
To the rights and views of those of other race,
But, won to friendship, friends of steadfast breed.
Nor sing I petrol's toys of dizzy pace
But the slow-trudging ox and ambling steed.

The smoke-flagged factory, industrial town,
Temples of this machine-enchanted age.
I leave to budding bards of fame full-blown,
Or over-blown, and make my pilgrimage,
At trek-ox pace, through plains austere and brown.
Not of mechanics, masons, engineers
I sing, but of bronzed farmer-pioneers:
Men who were horsemen as by right of birth,
Who from their saddles, grew, like trees from earth,
With swinging guns for branches, quick to flame
With deadly flowers; men who found living tame
Save on the brink of danger; men who won
Strength from the barren veld and burning sun.