[Editor: This poem by Louis Esson was published in Bells and Bees: Verses (1910).]
The Travail of Nature
The thunder storm’s drums and trumpets, the champing of surging seas,
The rustle of reeds at twilight, the sobbing plaint of the rain,
Wild winds that shriek in the heart o’ the bush, the falling of mighty trees,
Cry to me, out of the darkness, a lament of life’s unrest and pain.
* * * * *
All things that live, and are beaten and broken, pant with desire
For a dream-isle girdled by seas beyond the suns of the West,
Far from the lightning of change, from seasons of flood and fire,
And the woeful travail of Nature where the winds o’ the world will have rest.
Source:
Louis Esson, Bells and Bees: Verses, Melbourne: Thomas C. Lothian, 1910, [page 30]
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