While The Billy BoilsSearch(A little toad, taken from under the slate and cement at Day Dawn, was estimated by geologists as having been embedded there thousands of years.)
Tell us, little toad,Gasping in the light;Gouged from your abode,By the gelignite;Tell us, as you blink,In the glare of day,What you’d like to think,What you’d like to say.Is the earth the same,Has the brine its bent,As when you becameCoffined in cement?Through the glare and mist,Did the wild birds wing?Did a man exist?Did he speak or sing?Had he creed or code?Tell us, little toad!
Myriad solar raysShone upon the waves,Sucking them in hazeFrom their briny graves;Ere the deluge vastDrowned each mountain range,Were you pent and fastIn a prison strange?Had Vesuvius flowed?Tell us, little toad!
Maybe you were gaoled’Neath the strata slate,While the bunyip wailedFor its mammoth mate.Prisoned and engrained,Shut from all escape,Aeons ere we gainedProtoplasmic shape —We were gases then,Atomised in space,Molecules of men,Globules of a race!While you croaked in pools,While in swamps you glurked!Saurians in schoolsLumberously lurked,Mastodons immense,Floundered hill and flat;In the jungles denseHung the vampire-bat.Frighted by the quakesOf volcanic shocks,Over lava lakes,Flapped the mighty rocs,Was there human shapeAnd a human brain?Was he but an ape,Slaying to be slain?Had he fixed abode?Tell us, little toad!
Maybe you were tombedLong before the Flood,And the billows boomedO’er your grave of mud;Maybe Noah’s ArkFloated o’er your cell,Where thro’ ages dark,You were doomed to dwell.Day succeeded night.Centuries swept by,’Neath the dioriteLifetimes saw it lie;Man primeval strodeO’er the little toad!
Storms above you swept,Ages came and went,Still secure you sleptIn your safe cement;One day came a thrillThrough the rigid rock,First the probing drill!Then the shatt’ring shock!Then the light you saw,Light that blazed and burned.By a human pawYou were disinterned.Blinked you then your eyes’Mid the doubter’s grin,While professors wiseMicroscoped your skin.Lectures fluent flowedRound that little toad.
Marvel we that frogs,Toads and other things,Outlive dingo dogs,Courtesans and kings.Eve perhaps was notBorn from out a bone,When it found a cotIn Silurian stone.Abel p’raps was slainBy a brother’s hand,After it had lainCenturies in sand.And to-day we findSaxon, Gaul and Celt,In a legion lined,Peeping at its pelt;Piling prose and odeOn a little toad.