My Country

Poetry that stirs my soul.

Australia really is a country that is subjected to some horrific
bushfires and it would not be stretching things to far to have a new
verse added to My Country which included the line above.

My Country

The love of field and coppice,

Of green and shaded lanes,

Of ordered woods and gardens

Is running through 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 to the moon,

The sapphire-misted mountains,

The hot gold rush of noon,

Green tangle of the brushes

Where lithe lianas coil

And orchids deck the treetops,

And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!

Her pitiless blue sky,

When, sick at heart, around us

We see the cattle die-

But 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 threefold.

Over the thirsty paddocks,

Watch, after many days,

The filmy veil of greenness

That thickens as we gaze.

An opal hearted country,

A willful, lavish land-

All those who have not loved her,

You will not understand-

Though Earth holds many splendors,

Wherever I may die,

I know to what brown country

My homing thoughts will fly.

Dorothea Mackellar 1885 – 1968.