When Your Sins Come Home To Roost

When you fear the barber’s mirror when you go to get a crop,
Or in sorrow every morning comb your hair across the top:
When you titivate and do the little things you never used,
It is close upon the season when your sins come home to roost.

Many were the sins of others and you never were to blame,
Some were sins you shared in common, you must suffer all the same;
Some were sins of wasted hours with the wine cup or a mate,
But you cannot share the burden, and they come in duplicate.

Oh! you’ll find the fowls are heavy and their claws are sharp and deep,
They will bow your head in working, they will jerk you from your sleep,
And so many hands are eager just to give your back a boost
On the road to wreck and ruin when your sins come home to roost.

But you don’t let on they’re roosting and you take some only way,
And you never whine or guzzle and you neither curse nor pray;
You will never for an instant let your lower lip be loosed,
But you stand up like a soldier when your sins come home to roost!

And you’ll find them growing lighter till you find room for a few
Of the sins of other mortals who have weaker souls than you:
Then you’ll smile, and not too sadly, at old sins reintroduced,
And you’ll be a man in many when your sins come home to roost.

Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson was an Australian writer and poet. Along with Banjo Paterson, he is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's 'greatest short story writer'. His works frequently document the lives and struggles of rural and outback Australians. Lawson's own life was marked by hardship and struggles including impaired hearing and financial difficulties, which influenced his realist depictions of Australian life. Some of his notable works include 'While the Billy Boils' and 'In the Days When the World was Wide.'

Henry Lawson

English

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The Men Who Live It Down

I have sinned, like others, blindly, without thought and without fear,
And my best friends say it kindly, ‘You should go away from here.’
Shall I fly the paltry spirit of a narrow little town,
While the battle-drums are beating for the men who live it down?

Down the street where all men know me I can walk with level eyes,
They believe the lies about me, they can sneer, but I despise.
From my black and bitter childhood, from my dull and joyless youth,
It is I who, it is I who, I and Christ who know the truth!

I have sinned, but as a man might; like a man I’ll rise again
From long nights of mental torture, from long days of care and pain.
Pass me by with eyes averted, with a shrug or with a frown,
But their heads shall bow in ashes long ere my head shall go down!

...

Henry Lawson

To-Morrow

When you’re suffering hard for your sins, old man,
When you wake to trouble and sleep ill,
Oh, this is the clack of the middle class,
‘Win back the respect of the people!’
You are weak, you’re a fool, or a drunken brute
When you’re deep in trouble and sorrow;
But walk down the street in a decent suit,
And their hats will be off to-morrow! Old Chap,
And their hats will be off to-morrow!

They cant and they cackle, ‘Redeem the Past!’
Who never had past worth redeeming:
Your soul seems dead, but you’ll find at last
That somewhere your soul lay dreaming.
You may stagger down-hill in a beer-stained coat,
You may loaf, you may cadge and borrow,
But walk down the street with a ten-pound note
And their hats will be off to-morrow! Old Man,
Yes, their hats wil...

Henry Lawson

The Afterglow

Oh, for the fire that used to glow
In those my days of old!
I never thought a man could grow
So callous and so cold.
Ah, for the heart that used to ache
For those in sorrow’s ways;
I often wish my heart could break
As it did in those dead days.

Along my track of storm and stress,
And it is plain to trace,
I look back from the loneliness
And the depth of my disgrace.
’Twas fate and only fate I know,
But all mistakes are plain,
’Tis sadder than the afterglow,
More dreary than the rain.

But still there lies a patch of sun
That ne’er will come again,
Those golden days when I was one
Of Nature’s gentlemen.
And if there is a memory
Could break me down at last,
It sure would be the thought of this,
The sunshine in the pa...

Henry Lawson

Old Stone Chimney

The rising moon on the peaks was blending
Her silver light with the sunset glow,
When a swagman came as the day was ending
Along a path that he seemed to know.
But all the fences were gone or going,
The hand of ruin was everywhere;
The creek unchecked in its course was flowing,
For none of the old clay dam was there.

Here Time had been with his swiftest changes,
And husbandry had westward flown;
The cattle tracks in the rugged ranges
Were long ago with the scrub o’ergrown.
It must have needed long years to soften
The road, that as hard as rock had been;
The mountain path he had trod so often
Lay hidden now with a carpet green.

He thought at times from the mountain courses
He heard the sound of a bullock bell,
The distant gallop of stockme...

Henry Lawson

Wide Spaces

When my last long-beer has vanished and the truth is left unsaid;
When each sordid care is banished from my chair and from my bed,
And my common people sadly murmur: "'Arry Lawson dead,"

When the man I was denounces all the things that I was not,
When the true souls stand like granite, while the souls of liars not,
When the quids I gave are counted, and the trays I cadged forgot;

Shall my spirit see the country that it wrote for once again?
Shall it see the old selections, and the common street and lane?
Shall it pass across the Black Soil and across the Red Soil Plain?

Shall it see the gaunt Bushwoman "slave until she's fit to drop",
For the distant trip to Sydney, all depending on the crop?
Or the twinkling legs of kiddies, running to the lollie-shop?

Sh...

Henry Lawson

Written Out

Sing the song of the reckless, who care not what they do;
Sing the song of a sinner and the song of a writer, too,
Down in a pub in the alleys, in a dark and dirty hole,
With every soul a drunkard and the boss with never a soul.

Uncollared, unkempt, unshaven, sat the writer whose fame was fair,
And the girls of the streets were round him, and the bullies and bludgers there;
He was one of themselves and they told him the things that they had to tell,
He was studying human nature with his brothers and sisters in hell.

He was neither poor nor lonely, for a place in the world he’d won,
And up in the heights of the city he’d a thousand friends or none;
But he knew that his chums could wait awhile, that he’d reckon with foes at last,
For he lived far into a future that he knew b...

Henry Lawson