A Poem A Day by Romilly Wilde

The horses were ready, the rails were down,

But the riders lingered still

One had a parting word to say,

And one had his pipe to fill.

Then they mounted, one with a granted prayer,

And one with a grief unguessed.

“We are going,” they said, as they rode away

“where the pelican builds her nest!”

When her husband died in 1884 from over-work and

exposure to the drought, Hannay Foott moved to

Toowoomba in Queensland and opened a private

school nearby and published her first poetry

collection.

From A Poem A Day: Australasia & the Pacific