“My Country”
January 30, 2011 § 1 Comment
“In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1
“Let there be light!” the Lord God said,
And “Let there be a sky”,
And “Let us lift some ocean bed
And spread it out to dry”.
And in a word, without admin-
istrative paraph’nalia,
The Lord had done a super thing –
The Lord had made Australia!
He’d made a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
(Though probably, to be precise,
it wasn’t sunburnt yet:
It took a while the sun device,
To rise and shine and set.)
(And droughts and flooding rains you’d think,
Were later sorts of weather:
The Lord’d made enough to drink,
When getting things together).
But still, the far horizons and
The cliffs; the jew-el sea,
The beauty of a southern land:
He caused it all to be!
The setting, then, was ready so
He made some vegetations,
And filled the sky and sea below
With lively populations.
And then he made some animals
To run and bounce and creep:
Some reptiles and some mammamals,
To scurry and to sleep.
By now the place was fairly good,
But still it lacked an item:
The Lord had planned a neighbourhood
Of people to delight him.
And so he turned a dusty sod,
and formed a sprightly fellow.
And then he made a woman’s bod
And soul – to share his pillow.
And though the couple settled in a
Distant northern place,
The Lord had reared a winner
For the maiden human race:
A “ready, steady, multiply!”
And off the folk would spill,
From Eden out to Gundagai,
From Nod to Broken Hill.
And that it’s said told is rougly how
Australia came to be,
It wasn’t just a “big kapow”
Or random by degree.
An owner, drafter, engineer
And builder made the planet,
And having done so, put us here
To woman it, and man it.
The Banjo Bible 
This poem is based on Genesis 1:3-28, 2:4-14, and 2:18-25. “Let there be light” is the only word-for-word quote.