weather

[bob10]

Apoem about the weather

MY COUNTRY Dorethea Mackella


The love of field and coppice,
of green and shaded lanes.
of ordered woods and gardens
is running in your veins,
strong love of grey- blue distance
brown streams and and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
my love is otherwise.

I love a sunburned country,
a land of sweeping plains,
of ragged mountain ranges,
of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
Ilove her jewel sea,
Her beauty and her terror-
the wide brown land for me


A stark white ringbarked forest
all tragic to the moon,
the sapphire-misted mountains,
the hot gold hush of noon.
green tangle of the brushes,
where the lithe lianas coil
and orchards deck the tree-tops
and ferns the warm dark soil


Core of my heart, my country!
her pitiless blue sky, when sick at heart, around us,
we see the cattle die-
but then the grey clouds gather,
and we can bless again
the drumming of an army,
the steady, soaking rain.

core of my heart , my country!
land of the rainbow gold,
for flood and fire and famine,
she pays us back threefold-
over the thirsty paddocks
watch, after many days,
the thin veil of greenness
that thickens as we gaze

an opal hearted country,
a wilful, lavish land,
all you who have not loved her
you will not understand-
though earth holds many splendours
whereever I may die,
I know to what brown country,
My homing thoughts will fly


Amen to that, Bob.