Bush Meeting Poem by David Lewis Paget

There are men who meet their one true love
There are men who never do,
And I must admit I was one of these
‘Til the day that I met you,
But there'd been so many heartaches
So much angst with love in the past,
That I didn't believe my one true love
Could have crossed my path, at last.

I had tried to keep away from you
I had tried to turn my back,
Each time I saw you galloping madly
Out on that bare bush track,
You looked a treat on the old black mare
As her hooves came galloping through,
But I bent my head to the fencing wire
Rather than look at you.

I thought you must have been taken then,
I thought you couldn't be free,
You with the wild and haunting stare
You couldn't be looking at me.
I bored the holes and I set the posts
And I stretched the wire between,
I fenced off most of the valley with
You galloping by, unseen.

It all was part of a pattern that
You set, for all of your stay,
Up at the crack of misty dawn
And galloping past my way,
I'd watch you off in the distance once
You passed me, coated in black,
But turned my head with persistence
When you turned, came rumbling back.

The season turned from the summer burn
And through to the autumn blow,
Shedding the leaves of the stringy barks
And on to the winter snow,
And still you galloped and still you passed
In the mornings, dressed in black,
The same as your flowing jet black hair
With the white snow at your back.

And then on a cold and windy day
The mare came back on its own,
I stood quite still for a sudden chill
Told me that you'd been thrown,
I cranked up the ancient four wheel drive
Drove past the rust on the sign,
For down in the valley, deep in snow
Was a worked out copper mine.

You lay spreadeagled, over a scarp
With a twenty metre fall,
Your hair spread out like a Chinese fan
But you didn't move there at all.
I grabbed the winch, and lowered me down
‘Til I stood, and looked in your eyes,
And that's when my heart was lost to me
To see where my true love lies.

We live in a cabin, made of wood
With a hearth that glows in the dark,
We haven't got much, some wooden stools
And a table of stringy bark,
There's a lambskin rug on the parlour floor
Where a baby chuckles and sighs,
And you in your lovelight, baking bread
As I bask in your sparkling eyes.

22 February 2013