POETRY.

JUNE IN RHODESIA.

WINTER! And the torn banana branches

Rustle, rustle, in the dusty wind, While the veld-fire ever upward launches

Tongues of flame that leave a blackened earth behind.

Smoke-wreaths shimmer in the furthest distance,

Lucent turquoise veiling sapphire hills, And the brown grass with a long insistence

Murmurs like a cavern that the ocean fills.

All the myriad unrecorded flowers, Trampled on the black man's silent way, Lie forgotten in their earthen bowers : Unremembered as the dead and lost are they.

Summer floods have left the high roads whitening, Sandy, dry, they stretch a hundred arms, Leading Eastward, where the sea-foam lightening Rises, splashing coastward into thunderous psalms; Westward, where beyond the wooded kopjes League on league of land rolls into space; Northward, to the land of tombs and poppies, And the Sphinx's undecipherable face ; Southward, to the sunny dorp and garden, And the riches of the Golden Belt; Southward, to the land of hope and pardon, And the soldier sleeping dreamless on the veld.

• Here an old Boer waggon creaks and lumbers, Ox-drawn, driven by some bearded Piet, Watching changes with a mind that slumbers, Beaten, worsted, but unconscious of defeat.

Past him, dashing to an outside station, Twenty brown-coat mules go streaming by. Faithful mules who helped to save the nation Rhodes has added to his England's history.

Night comes sudden without twilight warning, Chilly, quenching the fierce sun's last ray; But behind her quick-flung veil of mourning Keeps a moon-lamp for the lions at their play.

From the valleys shine a hundred fires, Hearths of wanderers from a hundred lands Looking backwards to their dead desires,

Stretching forwards with their sinewy, sun-burnt hands.

Midnight! but the silence never falleth On the frogs' croak and the insects' cry; Hill to hill the grey hyena calleth, While the silent, slumbrous nights of men go by.

D. A. Bowna.