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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ABANDONED SELECTIONS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: On the crimson breast of the sunset
Last Line: Is watching you break your own!
Alternate Author Name(s): Ogilvie, Will Henry
Subject(s): Abandonment; Grief; Nostalgia; Property; Desertion; Sorrow; Sadness; Possessions


ON the crimson breast of the sunset
The Gray Selections lie,
And their lonely, grief-stained faces
Are turned to a pitiless sky;
They are wrinkled and seamed with drought-fire
And wound at the throat with weeds,
They sob in the aching loneness
But never a passer heeds.

I pity you, Gray Selections,
As I pass you by in the light,
And I turn again with the shadows
To take your hand in the night;
In homesteads and yards deserted
'Tis little the world can see,
But the wail of your endless sorrow
Throbs under the moon to me.

I come to you, Gray Selections,
When the crickets gather and croon,
An hour at the back of the sunset,
An hour in advance of the moon;
How eager they are to whisper
Their tale as they hear me pass!
Twenty at once in the oak-trees
Ten at a time in the grass.

The night-winds are chanting above you
A dirge in the cedar-trees
Whose green boughs groan at your shoulder,
Whose dead leaves drift to your knees;
You cry, and the curlews answer;
You call, and the wild dogs hear;
Through gaps in the old log-fences
They creep when the night is near.

I stand by your fenceless gardens
And weep for the splintered staves;
I watch by your empty ingles
And mourn by your white-railed graves;
I see from your crumbling doorways
The whispering white forms pass,
And shiver to hear dead horses
Crop-cropping the long gray grass.

Where paddocks are dumb and fallow
And wild weeds waste to the stars
I can hear the voice of the driver,
The thresh of the swingle-bars;
I can hear the hum of the stripper
That follows the golden lanes,
The snort of the tiring horses,
The clink of the bucking chains.

It is night; but I see the smoke-wreaths
Float over the dancing haze;
I can hear the jackass laughing
When south winds rustle the maize;
I can catch the axes' ringing,
And out on the range's crown
I can hear the red fires roaring
And the great trees thundering down.

I pity you, Gray Selections,
Your hearths as cold as a stone,
The days you must pass unaided,
The nights you must brave alone;
But most when the wailing curlews
Call over the drear lagoon,
And out of the ring-barked timber
Comes blazing the red, red moon.

They fought for you, Gray Selections,
The battle of long dry years,
Through seed-times of sweat and sorrow
To harvests of hunger and tears;
You turned from the lips that wooed you,
And Justice, awake on her throne,
For sake of those brave hearts broken,
Is watching you break your own!





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