"My Country"
by Dorothea Mackellar - First published by the London Spectator - September 5, 1908

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins;
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies �
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart around us
We see the cattle die �
But then the grey clouds gather
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains;
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror �
The wide brown land for me.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
Of flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold;
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

The tragic ring-barked forests
Stark white beneath the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the crimson soil.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land �
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand �
Though earth holds many splendours, Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

~~~~~~~oOo~~~~~~~

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