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;this has no name to name it by;yet ...

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 there,and...

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 t...

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,these shapes that spring from nothing,become a rhythm that dances,a pure design

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 meal ...

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 carry ...

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 leaf-silence...

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 moved<...

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,but he didn't mind
I can...

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 slopelike poe...

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,my lips to the live waterI saw him turn in the reeds
Black...

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 Th...

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 corroboree,murmur a broke...

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 sea
Waves of sh...