From Where The Blackwater Flow Poem by Francis Duggan

She has lived in Ferntree Gully a suburb of Melbourne for fifteen years or so
The one from the fields where the Blackwater flow
On it's journey through North Cork to the Atlantic sea
The big floods of Winter she often did see.

Married to an Australian with a teenage son
Neither of them have ever seen old Clara lit by the sun
Or ever heard the male pink breasted chaffinch in the prime of the Spring
On a leafy green birch tree in late evening sing.

The place of her birth from her seems far away
But in this Southern Land she will grow old and gray
Near the Dandenong Ranges National Park where the tall mountain ash trees
Can be often heard soughing in the freshening breeze.

For awhile she felt homesick but it did not last
And now she does not feel nostalgic for the past
Though she often thinks of her Homeland in May
When the birds in the leafy wood sing all the day.

To the laughter of the kookaburra at dawn she awake
When the butcherbird pipes in the wood at daybreak
Far away from the home of the gray hooded crow
And from the old fields where the Blackwater flow.