Henry Lawson Poems

Clerk, corresponding,
“Rooster and Comb”,
Here I sit idle
“Thinking of home”;
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When you’re suffering hard for your sins, old man,
When you wake to trouble and sleep ill—
Oh, this is the clack of the middle class,
‘Win back the respect of the people!’
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To the Editor of The Albany Observer

O my prow vas plack mit curses,
Ven I dries to write dose verses;
Ven I dries to write dot boem,
Dot de best was effer been.
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TO my fellow sinners all, who, in hope and doubt,
Through the Commonwealth to-night watch the Old Year out,
New Year’s Resolutions are jerry-built I know,
But I want to say to you, “Give yourselves a show”.
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Where the seasons are divided and the bush begins to change,
and the links are rather broken in the Great Dividing Range;
where the atmosphere is hazy underneath the summer sky,
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He's somewhere up in Queensland,
The old folks used to say;
He’s somewhere up in Queensland,
The people say to-day.
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She says she’s very sorry, as she sees you to the gate;
You calmly say ‘Good-bye’ to her while standing off a yard,
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Rifles of the Rear Guard,
Rattling through the rain,
Falling back and falling back
To make a stand again –
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When you’ve knocked about the country—been away from home for years;
When the past, by distance softened, nearly fills your eyes with tears—
You are haunted oft, wherever or however you may roam,
By a fancy that you ought to go and see the folks at home.
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Fools can parrot-cry the prophet when the proof is close at hand,
And the blind can see the danger when the foe is in the land!
Truth was never cynicism, death or ruin’s not a joke,
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