SCALY with poison, bright with flame, <br />Great fungi steam beside the gate, <br />Run tentacles through flagstone cracks, <br />Or claw beyond, where meditate <br />Wet poplars on a pitchy lawn. <br />Some seignior of colonial fame <br />Has planted here a stone-cut faun <br />Whose flute juts like a frozen flame. <br />O lonely faun, what songs are these <br />For skies where no Immortals hide? <br />Why finger in this dour abode <br />Those Pan-pipes girdled at your side? <br />Your Gods, and Hellas too, have passed, <br />Forsaken are the Cyclades, <br />And surely, faun, you are the last <br />To pipe such ancient songs as these. <br />Yet, blow your stone-lipped flute and blow <br />Those red-and-silver pipes of Pan. <br />Cold stars are bubbling round the moon, <br />Which, like some golden Indiaman <br />Disgorged by waterspouts and blown <br />Through heaven's archipelago, <br />Drives orange bows by clouds of stone . . . <br />Blow, blow your flute, you stone boy, blow! <br />And, Chiron, pipe your centaurs out, <br />The night has looped a smoky scarf <br />Round campanili in the town, <br />And thrown a cloak about Clontarf. <br />Now earth is ripe for Pan again, <br />Barbaric ways and Paynim rout, <br />And revels of old Samian men. <br />O Chiron, pipe your centaurs out. <br />This garden by the dark Lane Cove <br />Shall spark before thy music dies <br />With silver sandals; all thy gods <br />Be conjured from Ionian skies. <br />Those poplars in a fluting-trice <br />They'll charm into an olive-grove <br />And dance a while in Paradise <br />Like men of fire above Lane Cove.<br /><br />Kenneth Slessor<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/pan-at-lane-cove/
