Poem - Ella M’Fadyen

Who Gives?

By Ella M’Fadyen

When night enlarges her dim bourns,

And homing thoughts are freed,

And soul to soul responsive turns

In pity or in need,

Does no dumb pleading urge you then

That you should lie awake

And think upon the wounded men

That suffer for our sake?

Dear lads that made their promise good

Beneath the raining shells,

That won Australia nationhood

Beside the Dardanelles;

Whose onslaught from the hail-swept marge,

In swift ascending fight

Flung back the foe in one wild charge

To gain the desperate height.

(So rang the round world with their praise!)

Hot-blooded, thrust on thrust –

Our boys whose glorious deeds shall raise

Byzantium from the dust.

The long lists grow from day to day,

The stricken and the slain,

The bitter, bitter price we pay

For each stern field we gain.

By every wound we ache to bind,

By every weary brow,

By all the love of womankind,

How should we fail them now?

To man the very valiant heart,

The buckler, and the steel;

To womanhood no lesser part –

To succour and to heal;

Since from the old world’s day of birth,

From age to utmost age,

The sorrow of the weeping earth

Is woman’s heritage.

By all the strength of womanhood,

The glory and the woe,

Since Mary at the manger stood

Two thousand years ago;

By all the love that peopled earth

From cotter’s crib to throne,

That tends the couch of death and birth,

Is not this task our own?

With self-devoted courage true,

Defenceless, unafraid,

The Red Cross leads its knights anew –

God’s holiest crusade –

To tend the narrow beds of pain

By transport, base, and field;

My sisters, shall our hearts refrain

While there is aid to yield?

How precious are these lives at stake,

That by our grace may live!

Whose wounds are suffered for our sake –

Who is there will not give?

Pride, power, and ease, what are they worth,

The place for which man strives,

The garnered treasure of the earth,

Beside these dear young live?