Poems that you love

[RiverNotch]

wow, tha piece is a comfort! it widened my breath -- kinda like listening to Stan Rogers's Northwest Passage. you colonials always make the most expansive pieces, when celebrating your nation -- americans, brits, they're much too cosmopolitan.
our colonial history is spanish american, and really the only english piece i remember deali g with that is the white man's burden, oh joy (xD). i really need to keep reading through that book i have of filipino poetry in english, i'm so out of touch ----

We had haggis, clapshot and rumbledethumps -- it was glorious.  All our whisky seems to have evaporated in the heat.

Because today is Australia Day, we have Scotstralia Day in our house and make it a joint celebration of Burns' poetry and that of my own favourite, Banjo Paterson.  

The Old Australian Ways by Banjo Paterson

The London lights are far abeam
  Behind a bank of cloud,
Along the shore the gaslights gleam,
  The gale is piping loud;
And down the Channel, groping blind,
  We drive her through the haze
Towards the land we left behind --
The good old land of `never mind',
  And old Australian ways.


The narrow ways of English folk
  Are not for such as we;
They bear the long-accustomed yoke
  Of staid conservancy:
But all our roads are new and strange,
  And through our blood there runs
The vagabonding love of change
That drove us westward of the range
  And westward of the suns.


The city folk go to and fro
  Behind a prison's bars,
They never feel the breezes blow
  And never see the stars;
They never hear in blossomed trees
  The music low and sweet
Of wild birds making melodies,
Nor catch the little laughing breeze
  That whispers in the wheat.


Our fathers came of roving stock
  That could not fixed abide:
And we have followed field and flock
  Since e'er we learnt to ride;
By miner's camp and shearing shed,
  In land of heat and drought,
We followed where our fortunes led,
With fortune always on ahead
  And always further out.


The wind is in the barley-grass,
  The wattles are in bloom;
The breezes greet us as they pass
  With honey-sweet perfume;
The parakeets go screaming by
  With flash of golden wing,
And from the swamp the wild-ducks cry
Their long-drawn note of revelry,
  Rejoicing at the Spring.


So throw the weary pen aside
  And let the papers rest,
For we must saddle up and ride
  Towards the blue hill's breast;
And we must travel far and fast
  Across their rugged maze,
To find the Spring of Youth at last,
And call back from the buried past
  The old Australian ways.


When Clancy took the drover's track
  In years of long ago,
He drifted to the outer back
  Beyond the Overflow;
By rolling plain and rocky shelf,
  With stockwhip in his hand,
He reached at last, oh lucky elf,
The Town of Come-and-help-yourself
  In Rough-and-ready Land.


And if it be that you would know
  The tracks he used to ride,
Then you must saddle up and go
  Beyond the Queensland side --
Beyond the reach of rule or law,
  To ride the long day through,
In Nature's homestead -- filled with awe
You then might see what Clancy saw
  And know what Clancy knew.