The Sundowner's Dream - David Campbell

He sat by the fire;
It burned with a black flame
In the fluid air
And he told me his dream.

“There was no one but I.
The yellow hills stood
Against the coloured sky
As I walked down the road.

“I boiled my billycan
By an eye-clear spring
Where the town road ran;
And I heard the billy sing:

“ ‘To the right,’ it sang
So I turned to the right,
And the billy rang
Like a bell that night.

“By dawn I had come
To a sunstruck plain
Where magpie was dumb
For the want of rain;

“Yet on the distant ground
I saw a great sea flow
Before me, and I found
The billy was a crow.”

The black fire burned,
And a tune came from
The billy as I turned
Back the way I had come.

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David Campbell (David Watt Ian Campbell) (1915 – 1979) Australia
Source: The Boomerang Book of Australian Poetry chosen edited and arranged by Enid Moodie Heddle, Longmans, Green and Co., 1956