Page:The Poems of Henry Kendall (1920).djvu/379

 Dumb with the sorrow that kills,

Sorrow for brother and chief,

Terror of thundering hills,

Having no hope in our grief,

Seeing the fathers are far

Seeking the spoils of the dead

Left on the path of the war,

Matted and mangled and red.

Hornby, like a mighty fallen star,

Burns through the darkness with a splendid ring

Of tenfold light, and where the awful face

Of Sydney's northern headland stares all night

O'er dark, determined waters from the east,

From year to year a wild, Titanic voice

Of fierce aggressive sea shoots up and makes,—

When storm sails high through drifts of driving sleet,

And in the days when limpid waters glass

December's sunny hair and forest face,—

A roaring down by immemorial caves,

A thunder in the everlasting hills.

But calm and lucid as an English lake,

Beloved by beams and wooed by wind and wing,

Shut in from tempest-trampled wastes of wave,

And sheltered from white wraths of surge by walls—

Grand ramparts founded by the hand of God,

The lordly Harbour gleams. Yea, like a shield

Of marvellous gold dropped in his fiery flight

By some lost angel in the elder days,

When Satan faced and fought Omnipotence,

It shines amongst fair, flowering hills, and flows

By dells of glimmering greenness manifold.

And all day long, when soft-eyed Spring comes round

With gracious gifts of bird and leaf and grass—

And through the noon, when sumptuous Summer sleeps

By yellowing runnels under beetling cliffs,

This royal water blossoms far and wide

With ships from all the corners of the world.