Neil Gaiman

Poem First Read On January 26th 2011 At The Sydney Opera House
We killed them all when we came here The people came and burned their land The forests where they used to feed We burned the trees that gave them shade And burned to bush, to scrub, to heath We made it easier to hunt We changed the land, and they were gone Today our beasts and dreams are small As species fall to time and us But back before the black folk came Before the white folk's fleet arrived Before we built our cities here Before the casual genocide This was the land where nightmares loped And hopped and ran and crawled and slid And then we did the things we did And thus we died the things we died We have not seen Diprotodon A wombat bigger than a room Or run from Dromornithidae Gigantic demon ducks of doom All motor legs and ripping beaks A flock of geese from hell's dark maw We've lost carnivorous kangaroo SongtexteA bouncy furrier T-Rex And Thylacoleo Carnifex The rat-king-devil-lion-thing The dropbear fantasy made flesh Quinkana, the land crocodile Five metres long and fast as fright Wonambi, the enormous snake Who waited by the water-holes And took the ones who came to drink Who were not watchful, clever, bright Our Thylacines were tiger-wolves Until we drove them off the map Then Megalania: seven meters Of venomous enormous lizard And more, and more The ones whose bones we've never seen The megafauna haunt our dreams This was their land before mankind Just fifty thousand years ago Time is a beast that eats and eats Gives nothing back but ash and bones And one day someone else will come To excavate a heap of stones And wonder, "What were people like?" Their teeth weren't sharp Their feet were slow They walked Australia long ago Before Time took them into tales We're transients. The land remains Until its outlines wash away While night falls down like dropbears don't To swallow up Australia Day Aus Songtexte Mania