By giant boles, stemless and sapless,
Slow growth of the green centuries,
I look down the hill on the hapless
Defeat of the trees.
The jagged ranks sore and uneven.
The stark arms uplifted as though
Invoking an impotent heaven
To witness their woe.
For the loaf-mantled ridge and the rill-side
Do you think this bare pasture atones?
That seeming snowfall on the hill-side
Is but the white bones
Of the kings of the primitive forest,
Whose realm has long passed away.
Now heaped where the slaughter fell sorest,
And bleached in decay.
And the wind sees no sadder sight under
The leagues of the wandering sky,
Since it fled through the forest in thunder,
Or sank to a sigh.
Where the hill-side has long been a stranger
To the rush of its leaf symphonies,
And drought stalks, a dreadful avenger
In the wake of the trees.
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 3 December 1938
