HERE’S never a bough to be tossed in the breeze, <br />For it’s long since the forest was green; <br />And round all the trunks of the naked white trees <br />The marks of the death-ring are seen. <br />The solemn-faced bear, who had looked on the blacks <br />From his home with the ’possum and cat, <br />Blinked anxiously down when the death-dealing axe <br />Was ring-barking Skeleton Flat. <br /> <br />And, strange to be seen in the evergreen south, <br />The gums for ten summers have stood, <br />And dried in the terrible furnace of drouth, <br />Till harder than flint is the wood. <br />Now tall grows the grass at the roots of the trees, <br />But a beautiful forest it cost; <br />And the heart of the splitter is sad when he sees <br />And thinks of the timber that’s lost. <br /> <br />Here flies, through a sky that is glazed, the black crow, <br />And the eagle goes circling around, <br />Or evilly sits on a branch that is low, <br />With his gleaming black eye on the ground. <br />And loudly the jackasses chuckle in mirth, <br />When a comrade flies upward, until <br />Like a fragment of thread, in its height from the earth, <br />Is the writhing brown snake in his bill. <br /> <br />O fit for the place are the curlews that wail <br />On the banks of a distant lagoon, <br />Or round by the swamps that are shallow and pale <br />In the light of the nights of the moon; <br />When glist’ning and white are the frost-covered trees <br />That dead for ten summers have stood; <br />And the stranger, benighted, might fancy he sees <br />The skeleton wraith of a wood.<br /><br />Henry Lawson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/skeleton-flat/
