The
Tides Run Up The Wairau
The
tides run up the Wairau
That fights against their flow.
My heart and it
together
Are running salt and snow.
For
though I cannot love you,
Yet, heavy, deep, and far,
Your tide of love
comes swinging,
Too swift for me to bar.
Some
thought of you must linger,
A salt of pain in me,
For oh what running
river
Can stand against the sea?
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The
Bushfeller
Lord,
mind your trees to-day!
My man is out there clearing.
God send the chips
fly safe.
My heart is always fearing.
And
let the axehead hold!
My dreams are all of felling.
He earns our bread
far back.
And then there is no telling.
If he came home at nights,
We'd know, but it is only -
We might not
even hear -
A man could lie there lonely.
God,
let the trunks fall clear,
He did not choose his calling;
He's young and
full of life -
A tree is heavy, falling.
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Tua
Marina
Though
all my heart is in this windy city
With its street corners and its masts
and mills,
Often I wonder have any of its dwellers
Seen the rangiora
on the southern hills.
Who here has seen upon the road to Para
Five tuis swinging on a bough at
noon?
Who here has heard the wind among the raupo,
As I have heard it
by the old lagoon?
Who here recalls how in the wet Septembers
Snows on Mount Arnaud sent the
great floods down,
Or how the men with lanterns watched the Wairau,
Wading
like otters in its waters brown?
Who here would know how by the small blind river
Each sighing tussock roofs
a quiet lark,
Who here would care that in Brunetti's orchard
Blithe
buds are horning through the bitter bark?
No one here knows, or knowing would remember,
Nor would I remember if they
let me be,
For she is dead, with northern clods upon her,
Who, in our
childhood, knew these things with me.
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Booty
Ah
not as plains that spread into us slowly
But as that mountain flinging at
the skies
And not as merchantmen which trundle in the offing
But as
a privateer that boards a prize,
Let song come always at me and not to me
And, coming, let it plunder, burn, and flay,
For beauty like heaven
by violence is taken
And the violent shall bear it away.
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Contrast
It
was so cold the skyline seemed to splinter
As the ice in the puddles cracked
beneath the camels.
The great statute that we know as winter,
Unsoftened
yet by any Spring amendment,
Was full enforced - a sumptuary law,
Forbidding
earth undue indulgence
In leaf and flower, in hip and haw.
The caravan swayed like a ship under canvas when its topsails belly in the wind,
And the Magi looked over the rolling dunes
As a sailor to shore in his
mind.
Their light in the dusk was like a lantern at a mast-head,
Seen
dipping, the bluer for the salt air, afar off;
And their thought was deep
and slow and undulating
Like the rising and falling of a galley in the sea's
trough -
All very leisurely as demand great distances -
And the star,
as slow as reason, undulated too.
Ah but the shepherds on the hill above the grotto,
Like a bolt from the blue,
Hurtled headlong, helter-skelter, wild-foot, down the cragside,
As fast
as instinct - no conjecture, no dismay!
They had not watched for years; they
had not calculated;
But they knew the way.
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Shades of Maro of Toulouse
Where
are the words that broke the heart with beauty?
This is the age of the merely
clever.
As pate de foie gras
Demands the grossened geese,
You must
pass satiety
Because without morbidity
There is no caste,
No cachet.
You have not lived.
Also, whether with or without,
Use erudition,
Shrug in tags in strange tongues,
And leer by ellipses.
To play
it your way -
Ex pede Herculem,
But from your foot, oh seldom Apollo!
Or have it then,
Sus Minervam!
In one breath decry reason and avow it;
Demand it of others but claim to
transcend it;
Refuse to return to a hope you have failed.
There is human
respect in even apostasy,
And the metaphysical is above creeds!
Write of the poor but not for them.
The aim is altruism.
It enables savants
to evade
Where charity would demand
Contacts.
There is somewhat which flatters,
Which sends the thumbs to the armpits
In this role of dialectical defender.
I speak not of those humble
Who grieve for a world awry
And own themselves
frustrate
Save in random will:
Who hold reason is the mate of truth,
Not a bleak, rabid spider
That eats its espouser;
Who husk hate
And in beauty
Cry for the moon,
Not the paraselene
Of those
afraid to talk in their sleep
Lest they be intelligible.
Oh, God, in these our days,
Our dreadful days,
Give us simplicity,
Give us passion,
To write not of
But to and for man!
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