There are scenes in the distance where beauty is not, <br />On the desolate flats where gaunt appletrees rot. <br />Where the brooding old ridge rises up to the breeze <br />From his dark lonely gullies of stringy-bark trees, <br />There are voice-haunted gaps, ever sullen and strange, <br />But Eurunderee lies like a gem in the range. <br /> <br />Still I see in my fancy the dark-green and blue <br />Of the box-covered hills where the five-corners grew; <br />And the rugged old sheoaks that sighed in the bend <br />O'er the lily-decked pools where the dark ridges end, <br />And the scrub-covered spurs running down from the Peak <br />To the deep grassy banks of Eurunderee Creek. <br /> <br />On the knolls where the vineyards and fruit-gardens are <br />There's a beauty that even the drought cannot mar; <br />For I noticed it oft, in the days that are lost, <br />As I trod on the siding where lingered the frost, <br />When the shadows of night from the gullies were gone <br />And the hills in the background were flushed by the dawn. <br /> <br />I was there in late years, but there's many a change <br />Where the Cudgegong River flows down through the range, <br />For the curse of the town with the railroad had come, <br />And the goldfields were dead. And the girl and the chum <br />And the old home were gone, yet the oaks seemed to speak <br />Of the hazy old days on Eurunderee Creek. <br /> <br />And I stood by that creek, ere the sunset grew cold, <br />When the leaves of the sheoaks are traced on the gold, <br />And I thought of old things, and I thought of old folks, <br />Till I sighed in my heart to the sigh of the oaks; <br />For the years waste away like the waters that leak <br />Through the pebbles and sand of Eurunderee Creek.<br /><br />Henry Lawson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/eurunderee-2/
