Memories Of The Cold Northern Winters Poem by Francis Duggan

The mornings were cold I remember the old fields with frost hoary gray
And the hungry cattle in the farm sheds were bellowing for silage and hay
And robins, thrushes, sparrows and blackbirds by the back door were pecking crumbs of bread
Swept out from the kitchen floor by the housewife of them many more hungry days ahead.

The old stream from recent rain swollen bank high to the river did flow
And the hill that towered over the valley was wearing his clean white hat of snow
The migrant redwings they chirped on bare hedgerows quite weakened from the heavy cold
In Nature's Wild Kingdom it is said that few creatures do live to be old.

I hail from a colder and wetter climate where Winter weather goes far into Spring
The birds don't start nest building till April and few birds in March ever sing
But hope like they say springs eternal and I remember the great joy
Of seeing again the dark winged swallows above the old rushy fields fly.

The past I would rather not cling to but the past it keeps following me
It followed me from the Northern mountains to this Land in the Southern sea
From the Land of the gray crow and dipper to the Land of the emu and roo
And distance it also brings difference as different as red looks from blue.

Memories of the cold Northern Winters will be with me till the day that I die
And even the thought of now living in such a climate I must say I do not enjoy
I'll stay in the sunny Land of the wombat far south of the cold Northern shore
And of Clara that overlook Millstreet and the fields of old Claramore.