Short Poems

A little pretty bonny lass was walking
In midst of May before the sun gan rise.
I took her by the hand and fell to talking
Of this and that, as best I could devise.
I swore I would, yet still she said I should not
Do what I would, and yet for all I could not.

“Oh! Oh!”
All one can say,
Mount Yoshino
In flower gay.

The stillness of the Austral noon
Is broken by no single sound—
No lizards even on the ground
Rustle amongst dry leaves—no tune
The lyre-bird sings—yet hush! I hear
A soft bell tolling, silvery clear!
Low soft aerial chimes, unknown
Save 'mid these silences alone.

The eucalyptus-blooms are sweet
With honey, and the birds all day
Sip the clear juices forth: brown-grey,
A bird-like thing with tiny feet
Cleaves to the boughs, or with small wings,
Amidst the leafy spaces springs,
And in the moonshine with shrill cries
'Flits batlike where the white gums rise

Across the boulder'd majesty
Of the great hills the passing day
Drifts like a wind-borne cloud away
Far off beyond the western sky:
And while a purple glory spreads,
With straits of gold and brilliant reds,
An azure veil, translucent, strange,
Dreamlike steals over each dim range.

Upon a fibry fern-tree bough
A huge iguana lies alow,
Bright yellow in the noonday glow
With bars of black,—it watcheth now
A gorgeous insect hover high
Till suddenly its lance doth fly
And catch the prey-but still no sound
Breathes 'mid the green fern-spaces round.

A sky of whirling flakes of foam,
A rushing world of dazzling blue.
One moment, the sky looms in view—
The next, a crash in its curved dome,
A tumult indescribable,
And eyes dazed with the miracle.
Here breaks by circling day and night
In thunder the sea's boundless might.

The feathery fern-trees make a screen
Where through the sunglare cannot pass—
Fern, gum, and lofty sassafras:
The fronds sweep over, palely green,
And underneath are orchids curl'd
Adream through this cool shadow-world;
A fragrant greenness—like the noon
Of lime-tree in an English June.

The long lagoons lie white and still
Beneath the great round Austral moon:
The sudden dawn will waken soon
With many a delicious thrill:
Between this death and life the cries,
Of black swans ring through silent skie—
And the long wash of the slow stream
Moves as in sleep some bodeful dream.

The short sweet purple twilight dreams
Of vanish'd day, of coming night;
And like gold moons in the soft light
Each scented drooping orange gleams
From out the glossy leaves black-green
That make through noon a cool dark screen.
The dusk is silence, save the thrill
That stirs it from cicalas shrill.