Page:A Voice from the Nile, and Other Poems. (Thomson, Dobell).djvu/72

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A Voice from the Nile.
9

For thirty generations of my corn
Outlast a generation of my men,
And thirty generations of my men
Outlast a generation of their gods:
O admirable, pitiable Man,
My child yet alien in my family.

And I through all these generations flow
Of corn and men and gods, all-bountiful.
Perennial through their transientness, still fed
By earth with waters in abundancy;
And as I flowed here long before they were,
So may I flow when they no longer are,
Most like the serpent of eternity:
Blessed for ever be our Mother Earth.

November, 1881.