Judith Wright

The eyeless labourer in the night,
the selfless, shapeless seed I hold,
builds for its resurrection day---silent and swift and deep from sightforesees the unimagined light.
This is no child with a child's face;

I saw our golden years on a black gale,
our time of love spilt in the furious dust."O we are winter-caught, and we must fail,"
said the dark dream, "
and time is overcast."-And woke into the night; but you were…

What is the space between, enclosing us in one united person, yet dividing each alone.
Frail bridges cross from eye to eye, from flesh to flesh, from word to word: the net is gapped at every mesh, and this each human knows: however close our…

The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun.
Nights runs an obscure tide round cape and bayand beats with boats of cloud up from the seaagainst this sheer and limelit granite head.
Swallow the spine of range; be dark.
O lonely air.

Now my five sensesgather into a meaningall acts, all presences;
and as a lily gathersthe elements together,
in me this dark and shining,
that stillness and that moving

Along the road the magpies walkwith hands in pockets, left and right.
They tilt their heads, and stroll and talk.
In their well-fitted black and white.
They look like certain gentlemen who seem most nonchalant and wiseuntil their…

Over the west side of the mountain, that’s lyrebird country.
I could go down there, they say, in the early morning, and I’d see them,
I’d hear them.
Ten years, and I have never gone.

The moon drained white by day lifts from the hill where the old pear-tree fallen in storm springs up in blossom still.
Women believe in the moon: this branch I hold is not more white and still than she whose flower is ages old, and so I…

South of my days' circle, part of my blood's country,
rises that tableland, high delicate outlineof bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-clean, lean, hungry country.
The creek's…

You who were darkness warmed my flesh where out of darkness rose the seed.
Then all a world I made in me; all the world you hear and see hung upon my dreaming blood.
There moved the multitudinous stars, and coloured birds and fishes…

The blacksmith's boy went out with a rifleand a black dog running behind.
Cobwebs snatched at his feet,
rivers hindered him,
thorn branches caught at his eyes to make him blindand the sky turned into an unlucky opal

Glassed with cold sleep and dazzled by the moon,
out of the confused hammering dark of the trainI looked and saw under the moon's cold sheetyour delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart;
and the small trees on their uncoloured…

The day was clear as fire,
the birds sang frail as glass,
when thirsty I came to the creekand fell by its side in the grass.
My breast on the bright mossand shower-embroidered weeds

That time of drought the embered airburned to the roots of timber and grass.
The crackling lime-scrub would not bearand Mooni Creek was sand that year.
The dingo's cry was strange to hear.
I heard the dingoes cry in the scrub on…

The song is gone; the danceis secret with the dancers in the earth,
the ritual useless, and the tribal storylost in an alien tale.
Only the grass stands upto mark the dancing-ring; the apple-gumsposture and mime a past…

The rows of cells are unroofed,a flute for the wind's mouth,
who comes with a breath of icefrom the blue caves of the south.
O dark and fierce day:
the wind like an angry beehunts for the black honeyin the pits of the hollow…

This is not I.
I had no body once-only what served my need to laugh and runand stare at stars and tentatively danceon the fringe of foam and wave and sand and sun.
Eyes loved, hands reached for me, but I was goneon my own currents,…

Once as I travelled through a quiet evening,
I saw a pool, jet-black and mirror-still.
Beyond, the slender paperbarks stood crowding; each on its own white image looked its fill, and nothing moved but thirty egrets wading - thirty…

Now let the draughtsman of my eyes be done marking the line of petal and of hill.
Let the long commentary of the brain be silent.
Evening and the earth are one, and bird and tree are simple and stand still.
Now, fragile heart swung…

Tunnelling through the night, the trains passin a splendour of power, with a sound like thundershaking the orchards, wakingthe young from a dream, scattering like glassthe old mens' sleep, layinga black trail over the still bloom of the…

We meet and part now over all the world;
we, the lost company,
take hands together in the night, forgetthe night in our brief happiness, silently.
We, who sought many things, throw all awayfor this one thing, one…

When summer days grow harshmy thoughts return to my river,
fed by white mountain springs,
beloved of the shy bird, the bellbird,
whose cry is like falling water.

When I was a child I sawa burning bird in a tree.
I see became I am,
I am became I see.
In winter dawns of frostthe lamp swung in my hand.

So here, twisted in steel, and spoiled with redyour sunlight hide, smelling of death and fear,
they crushed out your throat the terrible songyou sang in the dark ranges.
With what cryingyou mourned him! - the drinker of blood, the swift…