Judith Wright

All things conspire to hold me from you –even my love,since that would mask you and unname youtill merely woman and man we live
All men wear arms against the rebel –and they are wise,since the sound world they know and stableis eaten away by ...

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...

Beside his heavy-shouldered teamthirsty with drought and chilled with rain,he weathered all the striding yearstill they ran widdershins in his brain:
Till the long solitary tracksetched deeper with each lurching loadwere populous before his e...

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 egrets ...

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 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...

The small blue Arab stallion dances on the hilllike a glancing breaker, like a storm rearing in the sky,
In his prick-ears,the wind, that wanderer and spy,sings of the dunes of Arabia, lion-coloured still
The small blue stallion poses li...