A Nation of
trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the
field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her
hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx
demolished or stone lion worn away.
They call
her a young country, but they lie:
She is the
last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman
beyond her change of life, a breast
Still
tender but within the womb is dry.
Without
songs, architecture, history:
The
emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers
of water drown among inland sands,
The river
of her immense stupidity
Floods her
monotonous tribes from Cairns Perth
In them at
last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast
is not: 'we live' but 'we survive',
A type who
will inhabit the dying earth.
And her
five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where
second-hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on
the edge of alien shores.
Yet there
are some like me turn gladly home
From the
lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian
desert of the human mind, -
Hoping, if
still from the deserts the prophets come,
Such savage
and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in
that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned
doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is
called civilization over there.
- A. D,
HOPE
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