Stumpy-tail Spring

My love and I in all agree
   As one, save this thing only:

Not vile, body, nor foe, flesh,
Your joys deluding, triumphs trash,
Fit to be foiled your every wish.

Out of the cloud my Lord the Sun,
Out of the earth my Lady Spring,

Spring held her fire
So long, the long pursuit, the watchers wondered
Would there be ever an end

Twelve foot’s the rise and fall
Of barometric Man

This mountain means discovery, since the day
I climbed it first in boyhood and alone,

Dark sea dark land lie close beneath
The muffling guilt of night,

From this rock spine, not three feet wide,
Rivers of a continent divide

The sun like a centaur leaping the ranges
Shoots to the heart my garden, shatters
The dew in a volley of wild carillons

Stentorian mountain, resonant as your name,
I greet you with joy, I greet you, I give you thanks

The rousing sun’s sea-dance and dazzle
Burnishes grassy cape and cliff,

You hold the timeless in your brief green boughs
The cardboard angels, home-made crib, the straw,
The new-born baby older than Abraham

When you were caught red-rooted in the drain
You wept of course, but did the same again

The young magpie, as large as either parent,
Piteously pleads the pathos of his need.

The tree-trunk rounds, a fallen Doric column,
are tumbled on the grass beside my gate.

No dolphin it was, but a six-month suckling whale
gashed and shark-mauled, tribeless, motherless,

At first it seemed a trek of migrant ants
climbing the skyline of this great red rock

A garden gracious, serene and spacious at Lambeth –
This is the dream, the vision that shall be its crown

..Three kangaroos, grey eminences, rose
staring, paws crossed, with worried faces fixed,

I heard a man of science tell:
The sun is ringing like a bell,

Come down from that Crest! It’s Australia Day, Emu –
We just want to say, mate, how much we esteem you.

… obliterating in instant mini-time
a universe of suns and planets
with or without their myriad forms of life,