Page:The Poems of Henry Kendall (1920).djvu/157

 Look forth, and shudder for the mariners

Abroad, so we for absent brothers looked

In days of drought, and when the flying floods

Swept boundless; roaring down the bald, black plains

Beyond the farthest spur of western hills.

For where the Barwon cuts a rotten land,

Or lies unshaken, like a great blind creek,

Between hot mouldering banks, it came to this,

All in a time of short and thirsty sighs,

That thirty rainless months had left the pools

And grass as dry as ashes: then it was

Our kinsmen started for the lone Paroo,

From point to point, with patient strivings, sheer

Across the horrors of the windless downs,

Blue gleaming like a sea of molten steel.

But never drought had broke them: never flood

Had quenched them: they with mighty youth and health,

And thews and sinews knotted like the trees—

They, like the children of the native woods,

Could stem the strenuous waters, or outlive

The crimson days and dull, dead nights of thirst

Like camels: yet of what avail was strength

Alone to them—though it was like the rocks

On stormy mountains—in the bloody time

When fierce sleep caught them in the camps at rest,

And violent darkness gripped the life in them

And whelmed them, as an eagle unawares

Is whelmed and slaughtered in a sudden snare.

All murdered by the blacks; smit while they lay

In silver dreams, and with the far, faint fall

Of many waters breaking on their sleep!

Yea, in the tracts unknown of any man

Save savages—the dim-discovered ways

Of footless silence or unhappy winds—

The wild men came upon them, like a fire

Of desert thunder; and the fine, firm lips

That touched a mother's lips a year before,