The wild duck startles like a sudden thought,
And heron slow as if it might be caught.
The flopping crows on weary wings go by
And grey beard jackdaws noising as they fly.
The crowds of starnels whizz and hurry by,
And darken like a clod the evening sky.
The larks like thunder rise and suthy round,
Then drop and nestle in the stubble ground.
The wild swan hurries hight and noises loud
With white neck peering to the evening clowd.
The weary rooks to distant woods are gone.
With lengths of tail the magpie winnows on

Autumn: the year breathes dully towards its death,
beside its dying sacrificial fire;
the dim world's middle-age of vain desire
is strangely troubled, waiting for the breath
that speaks the winter's welcome malison
to fix it in the unremembering sleep:
the silent woods brood o'er an anxious deep,
and in the faded sorrow of the sun,
I see my dreams' dead colours, one by one,
forth-conjur'd from their smouldering palaces,
fade slowly with the sigh of the passing year.
They wander not nor wring their hands nor weep,

My father made the walls resound,
He wore his collar the wrong way round.

When I was five the black dreamscame;
Nothing after was quite the same.

When I woke they did not care;
Nobody, nobody was there.

In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.

When my silent terror cried,
Nobody, nobody replied.

I got up; the chilly sun
Saw me walk away alone.

My mother wore a yellow dress;
Gentle, gently, gentleness.

The dark was talking to the dead;
The lamp was dark beside my bed.

When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.

I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.

If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out "I am
an orphan."

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!


Anonymous submission.

WHEN at the first I took my pen in hand
Thus for to write, I did not understand

That I at all should make a little book
In such a mode: nay, I had undertook

To make another; which, when almost done,
Before I was aware I this begun.

And thus it was: I, writing of the way
And race of saints in this our gospel-day,

Fell suddenly into an allegory
About their journey, and the way to glory,

In more than twenty things which I set down
This done, I twenty more had in my crown,

And they again began to multiply,

The bleak faced Winter, with his braggart winds
(Coiled to his scrawny throat in tattered black),
Posts down the highway of his late domain,
His spurs like leeches in his bleeding hack.

He rides to reach the huge embattled hills
Where all the brooding summer he may lie
Engulfed in Kosciusko’s silent snow,
His shadow waving o’er the lofty sky.

And jolly Spring, with love and laughter gay
Full fountaining, lets loose her tide of bees
Upon the waking ember-flame of bloom
New kindled in the honey-scented trees.

The Mountains
A land of sombre, silent hills, where mountain cattle go
By twisted tracks, on sidelings deep, where giant gum trees grow
And the wind replies, in the river oaks, to the song of the stream below.
A land where the hills keep watch and ward, silent and wide awake
As those who sit by a dead campfire, and wait for the dawn to break,
Or those who watched by the Holy Cross for the dead Redeemer's sake.

A land where silence lies so deep that sound itself is dead
And a gaunt grey bird, like a homeless soul, drifts, noiseless, overhead

LAST sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space,
Are you a drift Sargasso, where the West
In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?
Or Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?
Are you for Light, and trimmed, with oil in place,
Or but a Will o’ Wisp on marshy quest?
A new demesne for Mammon to infest?
Or lurks millennial Eden ’neath your face?

The cenotaphs of species dead elsewhere
That in your limits leap and swim and fly,
Or trail uncanny harp-strings from your trees,

The lemon sunlight poured out far between things
inhabits a coolness. Mosquitoes have subsided,
flies are for later heat.
Every tree's an auburn giant with a dazzled face
and the back of its head to an infinite dusk road.
Twilights broaden away from our feet too
as rabbits bounce home up defiles in the grass.
Everything widens with distance, in this perspective.
The dog's paws, trotting, rotate his end of infinity
and dam water feels a shiver few willow drapes share.
Bright leaks through their wigwam re-purple the skinny beans

    A crystallization of color spreads from the upper regions of the dark sky towards the trembling nipples of the waves. The feathering fringes of clouds fade behind pillars of green light. Transparent curtains tremble every-where. In the arctic temple, the hidden Samson of light shakes the moon-green pillars of the night.
    Color these crystals with sudden blood; it is dawn, or else the last consumptive saliva of the dying day. Heartless hard light!