Wild Dogs

Wild Dogs

Because I have heard the wild dogs in the night,
up there on the Daly in the empty North,
these days I itch with a vague dissatisfaction:
that cry rings too much in my memory, the sum
of all the world's hungers given voice,
vivid and potent in that haunted land.

Here, bound and shackled by duty and routine;
trapped in the steady erosion of my days
by meaningless rituals of sleep and waking;
I am webbed and meshed in the trivial.
The truth is up there, in the she-oak scrub
where dingoes pad on iron-hard paws,

yellow-eyed, cunning, implacable:
and lift their muzzles to the moonbright sky,
freezing the heart with their shuddering cry.
Before the last I make my camp again
in empty country, where the wild dogs sing
their terrible hungers beneath the bitter moon.