The Mothering Poem by Robert James Campbell Stead

I had lain untrod for a million years from the line to the Arctic sea;
I had dreamed strange dreams of the vast unknown,
Of the lisping wind and the dancing zone
Where the Northland fairies' feet had flown,
And it all seemed good to me.

At the close of a thousand aeons of sleep came a pang that was strange to me;
The pang of a new life in my breast,
The swell of a vast and a vague unrest,
And it thrilled my soul from East to West
As it fluttered to be free.

But I steeled my heart to the biped thing; of vast presumption he :
He would lure my lonely thoughts away,
He would sport himself on the sacred clay
Where the dust of the prehistoric lay;
But he scorned the soul of me.

So I stretched my plains for a thousand leagues from the mountains to the sea;
But he rolled them back with a steel-laid line,
And he crumbled space by man's design,
And he filled his life with the breath of mine;
But his love he gave not me.

Then I called him foes from the farthest north and the snowflake fluttered free;
But he took him trees I had given birth,
And he delved him coal from my bowels of earth,
And he laughed at me as he sat in mirth;
But he cursed the cold of me.

Then I cut him off from his fellow-men that his thought might turn to me;
But he strung him a line of copper thread,
And his fire-shod words swung overhead,
By the fiend of air his thought was spread
O'er hill, and plain, and lea.

Then I gave him hopes he could not define and fears that he could not flee;
And he heard my cry in the long, still night,
In my spirit-thrall I held him tight,
And his blind soul-eyes craved for the light;
But the light he could not see.

So I held my peace till I saw him sit with children at his knee;
And I sent them the sun, the wind and the rain,
And the ferny slope and the flowery plain,
And the wet night-smell of the growing grain;
And their love they gave to me.

In the last race-birth of the sons of men a travail holdeth me:
But out of the night of pain and tears
A new life comes with the rolling years;
And I fondle the child of my hope and fears,
And it seemeth good to me.