Do You Think that I Do Not Know (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?