Mount Ngungun, Glass House Mountains QLD

Have a nice weekend.

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Core of My Heart

 

Poetry by Dorothea Mackellar

 

The love of field and coppice,

Of green and shaded lanes,

Of ordered woods and gardens,

Is running in your veins —

Strong love of grey-blue distance,

Brown streams and soft, dim skies …

I know but cannot share it,

My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel sea,

Her beauty and her terror —

The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests

All tragic ’neath the moon,

The sapphire-misted mountains,

The hot gold hush of noon —

Green tangle of the brushes

Where lithe lianas coil,

And orchids deck the treetops,

And ferns the crimson soil.

Core of my heart, my country —

Her pitiless blue sky,

When sick at heart, around us

We see the cattle die …

And then the grey clouds gather,

And we can bless again

The drumming of an army,

The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country,

Land of the rainbow gold —

For flood and fire and famine

She pays us back three-fold …

Over the thirsty paddocks

Watch, after many days,

The filmy veil of greenness

That thickens as you gaze …

An opal-hearted country,

A wilful, lavish land —

All you who have not loved her,

You will not understand …

Though Earth holds many splendours,

Wherever I may die,

I know to what brown country

My homing thoughts will fly.

Done