Henry Lawson

17 June 1867 – 2 September 1922 / Grenfell, New South Wales

Jack Cornstalk In His Teens

“If not in the Garden, he had in the ark,
To neither the beasts’ nor the passengers’ joy.
Full many a boyish and monkeyish lark,
The sandy-complexioned, the freckle-faced boy.

And down through the ages he rattles the drums,
While armies and nations each other destroy;
The century goes, and the century comes
But he lives on forever, the freckle-faced boy.

All over the world are the lands of his birth;
And when Time and Transgression this planet destroy
He will come to advise the last man on earth
The fatherly, chummy, the freckle-faced boy.”
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