First Week in June...

I have found these three Australian poems, had never heard them before and yet one of them is by Dorothea MacKellar...feel like I've been walking around with my head in the sand. :)



THE COLOURS OF LIGHT


This is not easy to understand
For you that come from a distant land
Where all the COLOURS are low in pitch -
Deep purples, emeralds deep and rich,
Where autumn's flaming and summer's green -
Here is a beauty you have not seen.

All is pitched in a higher key,
Lilac, topaz, and ivory,
Palest jade-green and pale clear blue
Like aquamarines that the sun shines through,
Golds and silvers, we have at will -
Silver and gold on each plain and hill,
Silver-green of the myall leaves,
Tawny gold of the garnered sheaves,
Silver rivers that silent slide,
Golden sands by the water-side,

Golden wattle, and golden broom,
Silver stars of the rosewood bloom;
Amber sunshine, and smoke-blue shade:
Opal colours that glow and fade;
On the gold of the upland grass
Blue cloud-shadows that swiftly pass;
Wood-smoke blown in an azure mist;
Hills of tenuous amethyst. . .

Oft the colours are pitched so high
The deepest note is the cobalt sky;
We have to wait till the sunset comes
For shades that feel like the beat of drums -
Or like organ notes in their rise and fall -
Purple and orange and cardinal,
Or the peacock-green that turns soft and slow
To peacock-blue as the great stars show . . .

Sugar-gum boles flushed to peach-blow pink;
Blue-gums, tall at the clearing's brink;
Ivory pillars, their smooth fine slope
Dappled with delicate heliotrope;
Grey of the twisted mulga-roots;
Golden-bronze of the budding shoots;
Tints of the lichens that cling and spread,
Nile-green, primrose, and palest red . . .

Sheen of the bronze-wing; blue of the crane;
Fawn and pearl of the lyrebird's train;
Cream of the plover; grey of the dove -
These are the hues of the land I love.


Dorothea MacKellar

SUMMER

I am weary,
Weary of bracing myself against the sun’s hot hand;
I am weary, and I dream of cool places . . . .

I see a grassy couch
Under a canopy of leaves;
A reedy river murmers by,
Crooning an old, old melody
Tuned to a long-forgotten scale,
Made when the world was young.

Rolled to the river’s edge the hills lie fast asleep;
Pale stars slip o’er their ledge and sink into the deep:
Down in the deep they sink to slumbrous peace,
Down in the deep they drink the water of peace;
In the quiet deep they quench their fires in sleep
And drown in a cool green dream.

The sun insists his burning hand upon my head;
I am weary, and I dream of cool places.

Louis Lavater
1867 - 1953

THE MALLEE

Her spell enfolds us. We can never thrust
Aside the bonds which hold to us the grey,
Wind haunted mallee; Satyr-like she may
Crush out the blood of life to slake the lust
That burns within her. Circe-wise she must
Fling curses where her lovers kneel to pray,
And souls that worshipped her in youth’s glad day
Are hurled before her in bitter dust.
In vain we leave her in our goading fear
To bathe where Lethe’s darkling waters flow,
‘Twere idle boast to say we could forget.
Her lone wind-music calls, and ever near
Her grim, stark beauty haunts us till we know
In sudden wonder that she claims us yet.

Alice M. Lapthorne.