The Big Night (1934)
The Convent girls are dancing round
As though their feet had wings,
While faster yet the fiddler's bows
Are smoking on the strings.
And merry is the glinting sun
On every silken tress......
The Convent kids are cutting loose
The thirteenth night of Dec.
The music mistress laughs with glee
At every time she sees
The flicker of the dancing bows,
The twinkling of the keys.
The elocution mistress, too,
Has charmed the vowel stress
In all the kids who elocute
The Thirteenth night of Dec.
And merriiy will fly the hours
When in a Fairy ring
The songsters of the Logan will
Like Fairy people sing.
And all the ills of earth and man
Will don their gloomy dress
And take a header in Spring Creek
The thirteenth night of Dec.
We hope, the youngsters said to me,
The wildest Kerry hills,
The fertile flats of Christmas Creek,
And where the Widgee spills,
And where the Birnam rears it's height
Of wooded fearsomeness
Will trim their people's whiskers on
The thirteenth night of Dec.
Where leaps the Bardic fire in this ?
'Tis somewhat hard to see,
But still I hope those Convent kids
Will bring along to me
The best part of a handy flask
Of potheen, nothing less,
And let me drink success to them
The thirteenth night of Dec.
--FINN MACCUMHAL.
Notes
From the Queensland Newspaper the Beaudesert Times Fri 23 Nov 1934 p. 4.