Set me back for twenty summers,
For I’m tired of cities now---
Set my feet in red-soil furrows
And my hands upon the plough,
With the two Black Brothers trudging
On the home stretch through the loam,
While along the grassy sidling
Come the cattle grazing home.

And I finish ploughing early,
And I hurry home for tea---
There’s my black suit on the stretcher,
And a clean white shirt for me;
There’s a dance at Rocky Rises,
And, when they can dance no more,
For a certain favoured party
There’s a shakedown on the floor.

You remember Mary Carey,
Bushmen’s favourite at the Rise?
With her sweet small freckled features,
Red-gold hair and kind grey eyes;
Sister, daughter to her Mother,
Mother, sister to the rest---
And of all my friends and kindred
Mary Carey loved me best.

Far to shy because she loved me,
To be dancing oft with me,
(What cared I, because she loved me,
If the world were there to see?)
But we lingered by the sliprails
While the rest were riding home,
Ere the hour before the dawning
Dimmed the great star-clustered dome.

Small brown hands that spread the mattress,
While the old folk winked to see,
How she’d find an extra pillow
And an extra sheet for me.
For a moment shyly smiling,
She would grant me one kiss more---
Slip away and leave me happy
By the shakedown on the floor.

Rock me hard in steerage cabins,
Rock me soft in first saloons,
Lay me on the sandhill lonely
Under waning Western moons;
But wherever night may find me---
Till I rest for evermore---
I shall dream that I am happy
In the shakedown on the floor.

(Henry Lawson)