Poems (Forrest)/The creek in the scrub

by Mabel Forrest

THE CREEK IN THE SCRUB

At the edge of the sea the song I seek
Is the husky voice of a little creek.
In the heart of a tangled way it hides,
With a thread of honey amid its tides.
To the tumbled browns of its shadowed bed,
Like golden hairs on a pillow spread,
Comes a trickling light that a way will burn
Through the lace-fringed leaf of the shielding fern;
Where the touch of fancy in memory gropes
Is a slim liana, swaying ropes,
All ribboned green where it clasps the tree,
And the whip-bird lashes the mystery.
The cat-bird echoes an elfin jest
Where blown leaves eddy to earth's cool breast,
To blaze the quartz-white figs between
In lacquer red and enamel green.

Pan pipes unseen as the songsters come
To feast in the shade of the flooded gum,
Where a darting wing and a beak can find
Brown chestnuts glossy in tawny rind.
While chattering finches and magpies sleek
Have swelled the chant of the little creek.

Oh, I know what the moon is on the sea
And the brilliant stars in their witchery!
I know, when the sun is westering,
How a bright sail slants like a swooping wing;
I know how the shore grows fuchsia-pale
When sunset beats with his blood-red flail
The billowing gold from the fields of blue
To lead the gleaners of twilight through;
And I know that the noon has clasped the bay
With an opal chain on a silver spray.
I see at morn how the samphire strays
Till a streak of jade through the turquoise plays,
How the dawn strings pearls for the breast of night,
And the south wind laces the waves with white.

But I also know that my heart must seek
A spice-sweet scrub and a bouldered creek,
Where a tree-fern leans like a link across
The orange fungi, the emerald moss.