My father and mother are dead,
Nor friend, nor relation I know;
And now the cold earth is their bed,
And daisies will over them grow.

I cast my eyes into the tomb,
The sight made me bitterly cry;
I said, "And is this the dark room,
Where my father and mother must lie?"

I cast my eyes round me again,
In hopes some protector to see;
Alas! but the search was in vain,
For none had compassion on me.

I cast my eyes up to the sky,
I groan'd, though I said not a word;
Yet GOD was not deaf to my cry,

The fields were bleak and sodden. Not a wing
Or note enlivened the depressing wood,
A soiled and sullen, stubborn snowdrift stood
Beside the roadway. Winds came muttering
Of storms to be, and brought the chilly sting
Of icebergs in their breath. Stalled cattle mooed
Forth plaintive pleadings for the earth's green food.
No gleam, no hint of hope in anything.

The sky was blank and ashen, like the face
Of some poor wretch who drains life's cup too fast.
Yet, swaying to and fro, as if to fling
About chilled Nature its lithe arms of grace,

She sits in her glass garden
and awaits the guests -
The sailor with the blue tangerines
the fish clothed in languages
the dolphin with a revolver in its teeth.

Dusk enters from stage left:
its voice falls like dew on the arbor.
Tiny bells
sway in the catalpa tree.

What is it she hopes to catch in her net
of love? Petals? Conch-shells?
The night-moth? She does not speak.
Tonight, I tell her, no one comes;
you wait in vain.

Yet at eight precisely
the moon opens its theatric doors,

In the village where he married,
Doctor Eldebury tarried;
And for fourty years our people knew him well.
How he listered us and bled us,
How with calomel he fed us,
Only I am living now to tell.
Though his drugs were deadly, yet his heart was kind,
And with voice tuned cheerily and high,
It was "Up, now, my little fellow! livly's can be!
Come, take your medicine like a little man,
And you'll feel better by-and-by."

Count the mossy marbles in the graveyard!
Our old doctor and his patients, there they lie.

The sheep were shorn and the wool went down
At the time of our local racing;
And I'd earned a spell -- I was burnt and brown --
So I rolled my swag for a trip to town
And a look at the steeplechasing.
Twas rough and ready--an uncleared course
As rough as the blacks had found it;
With barbed-wire fences, topped with gorse,
And a water-jump that would drown a horse,
And the steeple three times round it.

There was never a fence the tracks to guard, --
Some straggling posts defined 'em:

I will be glad because it is the Spring;
I will forget the winter in my heart--
Dead hopes and withered promise; and will wring
A little joy from life ere life depart.

For spendthrift youth with passion-blinded eyes,
Stays not to see how woods and fields are bright;
He hears the phantom voices call, he flies
Upon the track of some unknown delight.

To him the tender glory of the May,
White wonder of the blossom, and the clear,
Soft green leaves that opened yesterday,
This only say: Forward, my friend, not here!

SO the last day’s come at last, the close of my fifteen year—
The end of the hope, an’ the struggles, an’ messes I’ve put in here.
All of the shearings over, the final mustering done,—
Eleven hundred an’ fifty for the incoming man, near on.
Over five thousand I drove ’em, mob by mob, down the coast;
Eleven-fifty in fifteen year…it isn’t much of a boast.

Oh, it’s a bad old place! Blown out o’ your bed half the nights,
And in the summer the grass burnt shiny an’ bare as your hand, on the heights:

Come back to me, little dancing feet that roam the wide world o'er,
I long for the lilt of your flying steps in my silent rooms once more;
Come back to me, little voices gay with laughter and with song,
Come back, little hearts beating high with hopes, I have missed and mourned you long.

My roses bloom in my garden walks all sweet and wet with the dew,
My lights shine down on the long hill road the waning twilights through,
The swallows flutter about my eaves as in the years of old,
And close about me their steadfast arms the lisping pine trees fold.

I saw an aged Beggar in my walk;
And he was seated, by the highway side,
On a low structure of rude masonry
Built at the foot of a huge hill, that they
Who lead their horses down the steep rough road
May thence remount at ease. The aged Man
Had placed his staff across the broad smooth stone
That overlays the pile; and, from a bag
All white with flour, the dole of village dames,
He drew his scraps and fragments, one by one;
And scanned them with a fixed and serious look
Of idle computation. In the sun,

In an old bark hut on a mountainside
In a spot that was lone and drear
A woman whose heart was aching sat
Watching from year to year.
A small boy, Jim, her only child,
Helped her to watch and wait,
But the time never came when they could go free,
Free from the bond of hate.
For McConnel was out on the mountainside
Living without a hope
And seeing nothing before him now
But death by a hangman’s rope.
Hated and chased by his fellow men,
To take him alive or dead,
An outlaw banned by the world was he