Page:The Poems of Henry Kendall (1920).djvu/121

 So comes the southern gale at evenfall

(The swift brick-fielder of the local folk),

About the streets of Sydney, when the dust

Lies burnt on glaring windows, and the men

Look forth from doors of drouth and drink the change

With thirsty haste, and that most thankful cry

Of "Here it is—the cool, bright, blessed rain!"

The hut, I say, was built of bark and slabs,

And stood, the centre of a clearing, hemmed

By hurdle-yards, and ancients of the blacks;

These moped about their lazy fires, and sang

Wild ditties of the old days, with a sound

Of sorrow, like an everlasting wind

Which mingled with the echoes of the noon

And moaned amongst the noises of the night.

From thence a cattle track, with link to link,

Ran off against the fish-pools to the gap

Which sets you face to face with gleaming miles

Of broad Orara, winding in amongst

Black, barren ridges, where the nether spurs

Are fenced about by cotton scrub, and grass

Blue-bitten with the salt of many droughts.

'Twas here the shepherd housed him every night,

And faced the prospect like a patient soul,

Borne up by some vague hope of better days,

And God's fine blessing in his faithful wife,

Until the humour of his malady

Took-cunning changes from the good to bad,

And laid him lastly on a bed of death.

Two months thereafter, when the summer heat

Had roused the serpent from his rotten lair,

And made a noise of locusts in the boughs,

It came to this, that as the blood-red sun

Of one fierce day of many slanted down

Obliquely past the nether jags of peaks

And gulfs of mist, the tardy night came vexed

By belted clouds and seuds that wheeled and whirled

To left and right about the brazen clifts

Of ridges, rigid with a leaden gloom.