The Russian march is soft and slow, <br />Through dust and heat, or slush and snow, <br />When the Russian skies hang grey and low <br />To the frontiers far where the Russians go; <br />And they march to-night and they march to-day <br />Like the grey wolves grey, like the grey wolves grey. <br />Nor song nor sound their track reveals, <br />Save the ceaseless “clock” of the waggon wheels; <br />But a rift in the mist shows a glint of sun <br />On the long, dark shape of a toiling gun; <br />And they strain by night and they drag by day <br />To a distant goal, like the grey wolves grey. <br /> <br />As the horses toil at the ends of trains, <br />And the ends of roads on the Blacksoil Plains. <br />And Ivan digs in the frozen clay, <br />And he rolls the logs a bed to lay <br />For a gun that’s five hundred miles away, <br />But as sure to come as the grey wolves grey. <br /> <br />He is marching on with a purpose grand, <br />For brother Slav in another land; <br />Whose tongue, perchance, he cannot understand.— <br />But he knows the cry from the far-away, <br />And he smells the blood like the grey wolves grey. <br /> <br />And Ivan’s wife in her den at home, <br />While hunger looms and his lean wolves come— <br />With her grey-black bread like the Darling mud, <br />And her tea-bricks bound with the bullock’s blood— <br />She shields her cubs by night and day <br />Like the crouching sluts of the grey wolves grey. <br /> <br />And I march with Ivan where’er he be, <br />With the foreign blood that is strong in me, <br />And the love and the hate that is fantasy, <br />Like the ghosts of a father’s memory. <br />With the blood that is strange to us to-day <br />As the strange wild blood of the grey wolves grey. <br />Grey wolves, <br />Grey wolves— <br />The strange wild blood of the grey wolves grey.<br /><br />Henry Lawson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/grey-wolves-grey/
