War poems
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Ode To Beauty
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who gave thee, O Beauty!
The keys of this breast,
Too credulous lover
Of blest and unblest?
Fate
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
That you are fair or wise is vain,
Or strong, or rich, or generous;
You must have also the untaught strain
That sheds beauty on the rose.
On A Cape May Warbler Who Flew Against My Window
© Eamon Grennan
She's stopped in her southern tracks
Brought haply to this hard knock
When she shoots from the tall spruce
And snaps her neck on the glass.
One Morning
© Eamon Grennan
Looking for distinctive stones, I found the dead otter
rotting by the tideline, and carried all day the scent of this savage
valediction. That headlong high sound the oystercatcher makes
came echoing through the rocky cove
Cold Morning
© Eamon Grennan
Through an accidental crack in the curtain
I can see the eight o'clock light change from
charcoal to a faint gassy blue, inventing things
Overnight at the Riverside Tower
© Tu Fu
Evening colors linger on mountain paths.
Out beyond this study perched over River Gate,
At the cliff's edge, frail clouds stay
All night. Among waves, a lone, shuddering
Redbud Trail - Winter
© James Lee Jobe
Once up on the ridge, the view takes me,
Brushy Sky High Mountain looms above
like an overanxious parent, the creek sings
old songs for the valley oaks, for the deer grass.
Less muddy, I kick my boots a little cleaner
on a rock that is maybe as old as the earth.
Answers
© Mark Strand
Why did you travel?
Because the house was cold.
Why did you travel?
Because it is what I have always done between sunset and sunrise.
The Gundaroo Bullock
© Andrew Barton Paterson
There came a low informer to the Grabben Gullen side,
And he said to Smith the squatter, "You must saddle up and ride,
For your bullock's in the harness-cask of Morgan Donahoo --
He's the greatest cattle-stealer in the whole of Gundaroo."
The City of Dreadful Thirst
© Andrew Barton Paterson
The stranger came from Narromine and made his little joke--
"They say we folks in Narromine are narrow-minded folk.
But all the smartest men down here are puzzled to define
A kind of new phenomenon that came to Narromine.
Mulligan's Mare
© Andrew Barton Paterson
Oh, Mulligan's bar was the deuce of a place
To drink, and to fight, and to gamble and race;
The height of choice spirits from near and from far
Were all concentrated on Mulligan's bar.
Song of the Future
© Andrew Barton Paterson
"I care for nothing, good nor bad,
My hopes are gone, my pleasures fled,
I am but sifting sand," he said:
What wonder Gordon's songs were sad!
The Ballad of the Calliope
© Andrew Barton Paterson
When the gentle off-shore breeze,
That had scarcely stirred the trees,
Dropped down to utter stillness, and the glass began to fall,
Away across the main
Lowered the coming hurricane,
And far away to seaward hung the cloud-wrack like a pall.
El Mahdi to the Australian Troops
© Andrew Barton Paterson
And fair Australia, freest of the free,
Is up in arms against the freeman's fight;
And with her mother joined to crush the right --
Has left her threatened treasures o'er the sea,
Has left her land of liberty and law
To flesh her maiden sword in this unholy war.
The Mylora Elopement
© Andrew Barton Paterson
Pondering o'er his predilection, Jimmy watched McGrath, the boss,
Riding past his lone selection, looking for a station 'oss
That was running in the ranges with a mob of outlaws wild.
Mac the time of day exchanges -- off goes Jim to see his child;
A Nervous Governor-General
© Andrew Barton Paterson
We read in the press that Lord Northcote is here
To take up Lord Tennyson's mission.
'Tis pleasant to find they have sent us a Peer,
And a man of exalted position.
How Gilbert Died
© Andrew Barton Paterson
They had taken toll of the country round,
And the troopers came behind
With a black who tracked like a human hound
In the scrub and the ranges blind:
He could run the trail where a white man's eye
No sign of track could find.
The Mountain Squatter
© Andrew Barton Paterson
But when the summer sun
Gleams down like burnished brass,
You have to leave your run
And hustle off for grass.
Those Names
© Andrew Barton Paterson
The shearers sat in the firelight, hearty and hale and strong,
After the hard day's shearing, passing the joke along:
The "ringer" that shore a hundred, as they never were shorn before,
And the novice who, toiling bravely, had tommy-hawked half a score,
