[Editor: This poem by Agnes L. Storrie was published in Poems, 1909.]
A Sydney Southerly.
Oh! Spirit, roaring up from those Antarctic regions
That draw men’s hearts, and hold them bound in frost,
You, with resolve upon your wings, and airy legions
With helms of courage icily embossed,
Oh! splendid tempest proudly hurtling from the south,
Kiss your weak city maiden upon her languid mouth,
Jeer at the lazy lover who lies sleeping on her breast,
Until he leaps up snarling, with the white foam on his crest.
Plunge up the rocky coast line, kindle or quench the stars,
Thunder your savage storm chords on our horizon bars;
Dance us the same fandango you danced when the great berg split,
And you drove the fierce green rollers to snap and harry it.
Smite us with icy hammers forged in the sunless gloom
Ere the spectral lights had budded, and burst into awful bloom;
Scourge us with lashing rain flails, shout, shout, aloud in your wrath,
Till the souls in our shrinking bodies shall answer and come forth
Lifted aloft by your passion, kings by your royal right,
Worthy to work in the daytime or watch through a fateful night,
Stripped of their sultry vapours, and hectic lassitude,
Clean with your barbarous candour, as natural, as nude;
Flung from their narrow orbits to battle with basic laws,
And answer the savage queries of a long-forgot first cause.
Source:
Agnes L. Storrie. Poems, J. W. Kettlewell, Sydney, 1909, pages 135-136
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