The Coach of Death

The COACH of DEATH

There’s a phantom-coach runs nightly along the Western Creeks;

Her four black steeds step lightly, her driver never speaks;

The horses keep there places across flood-worn plains,

Yet no man sees their traces, their bits or bridle reins;

For welcome or for warning she shows no lamp or light,

A shadow till the morning she steals across the night.

She never wants for passengers, the back creek settlers say,

A price so moderate as hers the poorest purse can pay;

The lost one, missed by measure of days or maybe weeks,

Pays lightly for the pleasure of coaching down the creeks;

And station hands and squatters, alike in ease reclined,

May praise the whirling trotters whose hoofs outstrip the wind

(who leave no tracks behind.)

You hear no lead-bars creaking, no footfall on the ground;

In silence past all speaking the flying wheels go round;

The horses have no breeders, their driver has no name,

But he swings the reefing leaders like a man that knows the game;

And through the stony ranges where swift hoofs strike no fire

They want no wayside changes, these steeds that never tire.

They’re fit to `stay for ever and are never short of work;

They run the Darling River from Menindie Lake to Bourke.

Where a thousand watercourses, bankfull or bound with drought,

Have seen the silent horses go gliding in and out,

Where the stars in red battalions are marshalled in the sky

To watch the black maned stallions with muffled hoofs go by.

They fear him on the Barwon, they curse him on the Bree,

And wish his goal a far one where’er that goal maybe;

But ever back and forward, in silence source to mouth,

He runs the rivers Nor’ward and runs the rivers South;

When winds the wavelets feather between the flood and fall,

He holds the blacks together and hears the dead men call.

In drifted, flood-wracked sailing on every swirling stream

He hears his patrons calling, and checks his noiseless team;

In belts of timber shady, when all the holes are dry.

His guests are waiting ready when the phantom wheels go by,

For every man in good time must book for Further Out,

It may be in Flood-time-it may be in drought!

Her load of clay-cold faces she never carries back;

The dim wheels leave no traces, the shoeless hoofs no track;

But all along the river in bends that she has passed,

The giant gum trees shiver in a strange and icy blast;

The clumps of scented sandal are tainted with her breath,

And teams are hard to handle behind the Coach of Death.

She lifts no mud in winter and stirs no summer dust,

Her pole bars never splinter, her lock bolts never rust;

Her parts are stout for wearing and strong her simple gear,

She’ll run without repairing from year to deathful year,

When every coach is rotten on the Western watershed,

And Cobb and Co. forgotten and all their drivers dead!

                                      Will Ogilvie