Kenneth Slessor Poems

THE cock's far cry
From lonely yards
Burdens the night
With boastful birds
...

SOPHIE'S my world . . . my arm must soon or later
Like Francis Drake turn circumnavigator,
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FEELING hunger and cold, feeling
Food, feeling fire, feeling
Pity and pain, tasting
Time in a kiss, tasting
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THOSE friends of Lao-Tzu, those wise old men
Dozing all day in lemon-silken robes,
With tomes of beaten jade spread knee to knee,
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You can shuffle and scuffle and scold,
You can rattle the knockers and knobs,
Or batter the doorsteps with buckets of gold
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The Snowdrop Girl in fields of snowdrops walks,
Whiter than foam, deeper than waters flowing,
Flakes of wild milk gone blowing,
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WHEN to those Venusbergs, thy breasts,
By wars of love and moonlight batteries,
My lips have stormed—O pout thy mouth above,
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The old orchard, full of smoking air,
Full of sour marsh and broken boughs, is there,
But kept no more by vanished Mulligans,
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ADAM, because on the mind's roads
Your mouth is always in a hurry,
Because you know odes
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So quiet it was in that high, sun-steeped room,
So warm and still, that sometimes with the light
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