[Editor: This poem by Agnes L. Storrie was published in Poems, 1909.]
Live Close to Nature.
Live close to Nature, lean thou on her breast,
She hath repayment, she hath help and rest.
Thy day so poor, so meagre planned by fate,
Take it to her and she will compensate,
Stores deep and vast
That will outlast
The heaviest drain thy famine need can make
She hath, and in her fullness thou thy thirst can’st slake.
This loud incessant clamour in thine ears,
Life’s myriad voices, laughter, shrieks, and tears
Drown them in her sweet silence, steep thy soul
In those rich spaces where the planets roll
Their rhythmic swing
Unfaltering
From aeon unto aeon, while they fill
The populous vault with silence thou too can’st be still.
Live close to Nature; when thy sudden thought
All shuddering pauses, knowing thou art nought
A breath — a vapour, when the warm live “me”
So late rejoicing, sees Eternity
Full-face
A breathing space,
And falters, when thou can’st not think of God,
Think on the dear familiar earth His Mediator trod.
For thy poor heart was never meant to roam
In such cold altitudes, this is its home
Till, as a chrysalis bursts from its sheath
And wins its wings, thou shalt some day through death
Rise
With franchise
To larger spheres, but now for sanity
Live close to Nature. She was made for thee
And fits thy needs. Bethink thee, with the curse
Humanity was given this tender nurse,
This bountiful great mother-heart that knows
Of healing, in whose ample veins there flows
Triumphant still
The Omnipotent will
That woke creation, and with vital force
Renews the springs of being ever at their source.
Leave thou thy cities and their devious ways,
That do but sear thy thought and warp thy days
In endless coils of custom, empty! vain!
A seed of folly bearing sheaves of pain.
Seek thou no more
The world’s false lore,
But read this mighty volume writ for thee
In royal characters on the impassioned sea,
On snow-capped mountains parleying with the sun,
On dappled meadows where quick shadows run,
On palmy isles in living azure set,
On the moist bosom of a violet,
Look
Where a brook
Slips into dimpled rest in some lagoon,
And smiles a sleepy silver smile unto the moon.
Or linger where the moss is softly spread
In quiet dells, the green towers overhead
Agog with secrets, rumours of a breeze
Of buds unsheathing, nesting mysteries,
And poised as light
As Saturn’s might
A harebell swinging on its slender stem,
Think on these revelations, deeply ponder them
They are not set for nought before thine eyes,
They are not hieroglyphics which the wise
Can scarce decipher — they have meanings clear
That whose will, may understand and hear,
They are for thee,
Assuredly,
Soul primers — God in part made manifest
Some other way, some other day, He will reveal the rest.
Source:
Agnes L. Storrie. Poems, J. W. Kettlewell, Sydney, 1909, pages 38-41
[Editor: Corrected “fulness” to “fullness”.]
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