Buckle on your cartridge belts,
Waste no time about it!
Force is massing on the veldts,
We must off and rout it.
What if fate should work its worst!
Men can grin in falling;
Come on, chaps, and be the first,—
Here’s your Mother calling!
Arthur Maquarie.
ADAMS
CCXXV
THE DWELLINGS OF OUR DEAD
They lie unwatched, in waste and vacant places,
In sombre bush or wind-swept tussock spaces,
Where seldom human tread
And never human trace is—
The dwellings of our dead!
No insolence of stone is o’er them builded;
By mockery of monuments unshielded,
Far on the unfenced plain
Forgotten graves have yielded
Earth to free earth again.
Above their crypts no air with incense reeling,
No chant of choir or sob of organ pealing;
But ever over them
The evening breezes kneeling
Whisper a requiem.
For some the margeless plain where no one passes,
Save when at morning far in misty masses
The drifting flock appears.
Lo, here the greener grasses
Glint like a stain of tears!