They left the vine-wreathed cottage and the mansion on the hill, <br />The houses in the busy streets where life is never still, <br />The pleasures of the city, and the friends they cherished best: <br />For love they faced the wilderness -the Women of the West. <br /> <br />The roar, and rush, and fever of the city died away, <br />And the old-time joys and faces-they were gone for many a day; <br />In their place the lurching coach-wheel, or the creaking bullock-chains, <br />O'er the everlasting sameness of the never-ending plains. <br /> <br />In the slab-built, zinc-roofed homestead of some lately taken run, <br />In the tent beside the bankment of a railway just begun, <br />In the huts on new selections, in the camps of man's unrest, <br />On the frontiers of the Nation, live the Women of the West. <br /> <br />The red sun robs their beauty and, in weariness and pain, <br />The slow years steal the nameless grace that never comes again; <br />And there are hours men cannot soothe, and words men cannot say <br />The nearest woman's face may be a hundred miles away. <br /> <br />The wide bush holds the secrets of their longing and desires, <br />When the white stars in reverence light their holy altar fires, <br />And silence, like the touch of God, sinks deep into the breast <br />Perchance He hears and understands the Women of the West. <br /> <br />For them no trumpet sounds the call, no poet plies his arts <br />They only hear the beating of their gallant, loving hearts. <br />But they have sung with silent lives the song all songs above? <br />The holiness of sacrifice, the dignity of love. <br /> <br />Well have we held our fathers creed. No call has passed us by. <br />We faced and fought the wilderness, we sent our sons to die. <br />And we have hearts to do and dare, and yet, o'er all the rest, <br />The hearts that made the Nation were the Women of the West.<br /><br />George Essex Evans<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/women-of-the-west/
