Soft veils of pearl shut out the sunset fires,
Faint moonshine floods the sombre wooded plain;
The dews along the threaded fencing-wires
Are thick as beaded chains of amber rain,
On such a night as this how memory lingers
In dim lost vales by fairies sentineled,
Hearing in haunted glades the leafland singers,
The magpies in the moonlight at Dunkeld.
All day long they fluted to the valleys,
Flung largesse, of song across the blue,
At dawn and dusk along the red-gum alleys
They sang their matins, said their vespers through.
Should they not be weary at day's winging,
Tired of the gladness all the bright hours held?
Or are September days too short for singing?
Is the moonshine sunlight for them at Dunkeld?
The camphor-laurels lean across the garden
The trembling briar scatters silver tears,
The guardian cypress still keeps watch and warden:
Its shadow seem to point across the years.
I am caught between the now and yesterday.
Hearing, before my dreaming be dispelled
The liquid minstrelsy. the wood notes gay,
In long moon-dappled shadows at Dunkeld.
The red-gums keep their royal splendor still
The lilac's green and silver after rain;
Through leafy choirs across the quarried hill
The woodland music swells, and dies again.
And on the golden gales of new Septembers
Like wind-blown magic, joyous, silver-belled,
Faintly and far away, my heart remembers
The magpies in the moonlight at Dunkeld,
First published in The Bulletin, 7 November 1928
