DO YOU THINK THAT I DO NOT KNOW

by Henry Lawson

tune Slim Dusty



They say that I never have written of love

As a writer of songs should do

They say that I never could touch the strings

With a touch that is firm and true

They say I know nothing of women and men

In the fields where love's roses grow

I must write, they say, with a haunting pen

Do you think that I do not know?



My love burst came like an English spring

In the days when our hair was brown

And the hem of her skirt was a sacred thing

Her hair was an angel's crown

The shock when another man touched her arm

Where the dancer sat in a row'

The hope and despair and the false alarm

Do you think that I do not know?



By the arbor lights on the western farms

You remember the question put

While you held her warm in your quavering arms

You trembled from head to foot

The electric shock from her fingertips

The murmuring answer low

The soft shy yielding of warm red lips

Do you think that I do not know?



She was buried at Brighton, where Gordon sleeps

When I was a world away

And the sad old garden its secret keeps

For nobody knows today

She left a message for me to read

Where the wild, wide oceans flow

Do you know how the heart of a man can bleed?

Do you think that I do not know?

I stood by the grave where the dead girl lies

When the sunlit scene was fair

'Neath the white clouds high in the autumn skies

I answered the message there

But the haunting words of the dead to me

She'll go wherever I go

She lives in the marriage that might have been

Do you think that I do not know?



sung by Martyn Wyndham-Read

@love @death

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