"Australia Day" aka "Mega Fauna" a poem by Neil Gaiman

We killed them all when we came here,
The people came and burned their land,
The forests where they used to feed.
We burned the trees that gave them shade,
And then burned bush to scrub to heath,
We made it easier to hunt.
We changed the land and they were gone.

Today our beast and dreams are small,
As species fall to time and us.
But back before the black folk came,
The white folk's fleet arrived,
Before we built our cities here before the casual genocide.
This was the land where nightmares loped and hopped and ran and crawled and slid.
And then we did the things we did.
And thus we died, the things we died.

We have not seen Diprotodon. A wombat bigger than a room.
Or run from Dromornithidae. Gigantic demon ducks of doom.
All motor legs and ripping beaks a flock of geese from hell's dark moor.
We've lost carnivorous kangaroo, a bouncy furrier T-Rex.
And Thylacoleo carnifex.
The rat king devil lion thing, the drop bear fantasy made flesh.
Quincarna. The land crocodile five metres long and fast as fright.
Wonambi. The enormous snake who waited by the water holes,
And took the ones that came to drink who were not watchful,
clever,
bright.

Our thylacines were tiger wolves until we drove them off the map.
Then Megalania, seven metres, a venomous enormous lizard and more and more,
The ones who's bones we've never seen.
The mega fauna haunt our dreams.
This was their land before man kind,
Just fifty thousand years ago.

Time is a beast that eats and eats,
gives nothing back but ash and bones.
And one day someone else will come to excavate a heap of stones and wonder;
'What were people like?'
Their teeth weren't sharp.
Their feet were slow.
They walked Australia long ago.
Before time took them into tales.

With transience the land remains until its outlines wash away,
While night falls down like drop bears don't,
To swallow up Australia Day.