Girl, Boy, Flower, Bicycle - M. K. Joseph

Girl, Boy, Flower, Bicycle
- M. K. Joseph

This girl
Waits at the corner for
This boy
Freewheeling on his bicycle.
She holds
A flower in her hand
A gold flower
In her hands she holds
The sun.
With power between his thighs
The boy
Comes smiling to her
He rides
A bicycle that glitters like
The wind.
This boy this girl
They walk
In step with the wind
Arm in arm
They climb the level street
To where
Laid on the glittering handlebars
The flower
Is round and shining as
The sun


O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

The Magpies - Denis Glover

The Magpies
- Denis Glover

When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm
The bracken made their bed,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.

Tom's hand was strong to the plough
Elizabeth's lips were red,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.

Year in year out they worked
While the pines grew overhead,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.

But all the beautiful crops soon went
To the mortgage-man instead,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.

Elizabeth is dead now (it's years ago)
Old Tom went light in the head;
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.

The farm's still there. Mortgage corporations
Couldn't give it away.
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies say.


O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

Denis Glover (1912 - 80). 'The Magpies', with its Depression landacape, is proably the nearest thing New Zealand verse has to a 'classic' - though Glover's own Sings Harry sequence woudl run it close; it first appeared in Recent Poems (Christchurch, 1941). Glover was a notable printer as well as a poet, and founded the Caxton Press, which published many important books of New Zealand poetry. His own poetry is lyrical and satirical by turns. Penguin published a Selected Poems in 1981.

From Manhire, B. (Ed.). (1993). 100 new zealand poems. Auckland: Godwit Publishing Ltd

The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch - Allen Curnow

The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch
- Allen Curnow

The skeleton of the moa on iron crutches
Broods over no great waste; a private swamp
Was where this tree grew feathers once, that hatches
Its dusty clutch, and guards them from the damp.

Interesting failure to adapt on islands,
Taller but not more fallen than I, who come
Bone to his bone, peculiarly New Zealand's.
The eyes of children flicker round this tomb

Under the skylights, wonder at the huge egg
Found in a thousand pieces, pieced together
But with less patience than the bones that dug
In time deep shelter against the ocean weather:

Not I, some child, born in a marvelous year,
Will learn the trick of standing upright here.


O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

Time - Allen Curnow

Missed out on Wednesday post. This is a catch up




Time
- Allen Curnow

I am the nor'west air nosing among the pines
I am the water-race and the rust on railway lines
I am the mileage recorded on the yellow signs.

I am dust, I am distance, I am lupins along the beach
I am the sums the sole-charge teachers teach
I am cows called to milking and the magpie's screech.

I am nine o'clock in the morning when the office is clean
I am the slap of the belting and the smell of the machine
I am the place in the park where the lovers were seen.

I am recurrent music the children hear
I am level noises in the remembering ear
I am the sawmill and the passionate second gear.

I, Time, am all these yet these exist
Among my mountainous fabrics like a mist,
So do they the measurable world resist.

I, Time, call down, condense, confer
On the wiling memory the shape these were:
I, more than your conscious carrier,

Am island, am sea, am father, farm, and friend;
Though I am here all things my coming attend;
I am, you have heard it, the Beginning and the End.



O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

Solitude - A. R. D. Fairburn

I missed out on Tuesday's post. This is a catch up



Solitude
- A. R. D. Fairburn

The curtains in the solemn room
are drawn against the winter dusk;
the lady sitting in the gloom
has hair that faintly smells of musk.

As in some dim romantic night
the mist will not divulge the moon,
around her unbetrothed plight
her thoughts have woven a cocoon.

Now recollection brings again
the distant hour, the tide that flowed,
the word that might have flowered then
as epic or as episode.

Half proud because the thing she sought,
still lacking, is inviolate,
half puzzled by that eerie thought
she rocks her chair and scans the grate.

Then suddenly she sees it clear,
the monstrous image, cold, precise -
the body of the mountaineer
preserved within the glacial ice,
for ever safe, where none shall seek,
beneath the u attempted peak.



O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

The Estuary - A. R. D. Fairburn

Just realised that I missed some days. Was saving the posts rather than publishing them. Consider this a bonus to make up for missed days.

We sung this poem in an arrangement by Leonie Holmes. It was the piece of music which showed me the freedom of using a combination of graphic notation with a choir. I am ever grateful.

The Estuary - A. R. D. Fairburn

The wind has died, no motion now
in the summer's sleepy breath. Silver the sea-grass,
the shells and the driftwood, fixed in the moon's vast crystal.
Think: long after, when the walls of the small house
have collapsed upon us, each alone,
far gone the earth's invasion
the slow earth bedding and filling the bone,
this water will still be crawling up the estuary,
fingering its way among the channels, licking the stones;
and the floating shells, minute argosies
under the giant moon, still shoreward glide.
among the mangroves on the creeping tide.

The noise of gulls comes through the shining darkness
overt he dunes and the sea. Now the clouded moon
is warm in her nest of light. The world's a shell
where distant waves are murmuring of a time
beyond this time. Give me the ghost of your hand:
unreal, unread the dunes,
the sea, the mangroves, and the moon's white light,
unreal, beneath our naked feet, the sand.



O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

A farewell - A. R. D. FairburnA

A farewell - A. R. D. Fairburn

What is there left to be said?
There is nothing we can say,
nothing at all to be done
to undo the time of day;
no words to make the sun
roll east, or raise the dead.

I loved you as I love life:
the hand I stretched out to you
returning like Noah's dove
brought a new earth to view,
till I was quick with love;
but Time sharpens his knife,

Time smiles and whets his knife,
and something has got to come out
quickly, and be buried deep,
not spoken or thought about
or remembered even in sleep.
You must live, get on with your life.


O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

Rocket Show - James K. Baxter

Rocket Show
- James K. Baxter

As warm north rain breaks over suburb houses,
Streaming on window glass, its drifting hazes
Covering harbour ranges with a dense hood:
I recall how eighteen months ago I stood
Ankle-deep in sand on an Otago beach
Watching the fireworks flare over strident surf and bach,
In brain grey ash, in heart the sea-change flowing
Of one love dying and another growing.

For love grows like the crocus bulb in winter
Hiding from snow and from itself the tender
Green frond in embryo; but dies as rockets die
(White sparks of pain against a steel-dark sky)
With firebird wings trailing an arc of grief
Across a night inhuman as the grave,
Falling at length a dull and smouldering shell
To frozen dunes and the wash of the quenching swell.

There was little room left where the crowd had trampled
Grass and lupin bare, under the pines that trembled
In gusts from the sea. On a sandhillock I chose
A place to watch from. Then the rockets rose,
O marvellous, like self-destroying flowers
On slender stems, with seed-pods full of flares,
Raining down amber, scarlet, pennies from heaven
On the skyward straining heads and still sea-haven.
Had they brought death, we would have stood the same,
I think, in ecstasy at the world-end flame.

It is the rain streaming reminds me of
Those ardent showers, cathartic love and grief.
As I walked home through the cold street by moon-light,
My steps ringing in the October night,
I thought of our strange lives, the grinding cycle
Of death and renewal come to full circle,
And of man's heart, that blind Rosetta stone,
Mad as the polar moon, decipherable by none.



O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

Farmhand - James K. Baxter

Farmhand
- James K. Baxter

You will see him light a cigarette
At the hall door careless, leaning his back
Against the wall, or telling some new joke
To a friend, or looking out into the secret night.

But always his eyes turn
To the dance floor and the girls drifting like flowers
Before the music that tears
Slowly in his mind an old wound open.

His red sunburnt face and hairy hands
Were not made for dancing or love-making
But rather the earth wave breaking
To the plough, and crops slow-growing as his mind.

He has no girl to run her fingers through
His sandy hair, and giggle at his side
When Sunday couples walk. Instead
He has his awkward hopes, his envious dreams to yarn to.

But ah in harvest watch him
Forking stocks, effortless and strong –
Or listening like a lover to the song
Clear, without fault, of a new tractor engine.


O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

Poem for Colin - 24 - James K. Baxter

Poem for Colin – 24
- James K. Baxter

The kids here don't shout out, 'Jesus!'
Or, 'Hullo, Moses!' as they did in Auckland

When they saw my hair - these ones are too polite -
They call me Mr Baxter when they bring the milk;

I almost wish they didn't; but Sister has them well trained -
And soon she wants me to give them a talk about drugs;

What should I say? - 'Childre, your mothers and your fathers
Get stoned on grog; in Auckland they get stoned on pot;

It does no harm at all, as far as I know
From smoking it; but the big firms are unloading

Pep pills for slimming, tablets for sleeping,
On the unlucky world - those ones can drive you mad -

Money and prestige are worse drugs than morphine' -
That way I'd hit the target; but I doubt if the nuns would think it
wise.




O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

Ballad of Calvary Street - James K. Baxter

Ballad of Calvary Street
- James K. Baxter

On Calvary Street are trellises
Where bright as blood the rose bloom,
And gnomes like pagan fetishes
Hang their hats on an empty tomb
Where two old souls go slowly mad,
National Mum and Labour Dad.

Each Saturday, when full of smiles
The children come to pay their due,
Mum takes down the family files
And cover to cover she thumbs them through
Poor Len before he went away
And Mabel on her wedding day.

The meal-brown scones display her knack
Her polished over spits with rage,
While in Grunt Grotto at the back
Dad sits and reads the Sporting Page,
Then ambles out in boots of lead
To weed around the parsnip bed.

A giant parsnip sparks his eye,
Majestic as the Tree of Life;
He washes it and rubs it dry
And takes it in to his old wife -
'Look, Laura, would that be a fit?
The bastard has a flange on it!'

When both were young, she would have laughed
A goddess in her tartan skirt,
But wisdom, age and mothercraft
Have rubbed it home that men like dirt:
Five children and a fallen womb,
A golden crown beyond the tomb.

Nearer the bone, sin is sin,
And women bear the cross of woe,
And that affair with Mrs. Flynn
(It happened thirty years ago)
Though never mentioned, means that he
Will get no sugar in his tea.

The afternoon goes by, goes by,
The angels harp above a cloud;
A son-in-law with spotted tie
And daughter Alice fat and loud
Discuss the virtues of insurance
And stuff their tripes with trained endurance.

Flood-waters hurl upoin the dyke
And Dad himself can go to town,
For little Charlie on his trike
Has ploughed another iris down.
His parents rise to chain the beast,
Brush off the last crumbs of their lovefeast.

And so these two old fools are left,
A rosy pair in the evening light,
To question Heaven's dubious gift,
To hag and grumble, growl and fight:
The love they kill won't let them rest,
Two birds that peck in one fouled nest.

Why hammer nails? Why give no change?
Habit, habit clogs them dumb.
The Sacred Heart above the range
Will bleed and burn till Kingdom Come,
But Yin and Yang won't ever meet
In Calvary Street, in Calvary Street.



O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

The Bay - James K. Baxter

The Bay
- James K. Baxter

One the road to the bay was a lake of rushes
Where we bathed at times and changed in the bamboos.
Now it is rather to stand and say
How many roads we take that lead to Nowhere,
The alley overgrown, no meaning now but loss:
Not that veritable garden where everything comes easy.

And by the bay itself were cliffs with carved names
And a hut on the shore by the Maori ovens.
We raced boats from the banks of the pumice creek
Or swam in those autumnal shallows
Growing cold in amber water, riding the logs
Upstream, and waiting for the taniwha.

So now I remember the bay and the little spiders
On driftwood, so poisonous and quick.
The carved cliffs and the great outcrying surf
With currents round the rocks and the birds rising.
A thousand times an hour is torn across
And burned for the sake of going on living.
But I remember the bay that never was
And stand like stone and cannot turn away.



O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

Te Whetu Plains -Edward Tregear

Te Whetu Plains
-Edward Tregear

A lonely rock above a midnight plain,
A sky whose moonlit darkness flies
No shadow from the 'Children of the Rain',
A stream whose double crescent far-off lies,
And seems to glitter back the silver of skies.

The table-lands stretch step by step below
In giant terraces, their deeper ledges
Banded by blackened swamps (that, near, I know
Convolvulus-entwined) whose whitened edges
Are ghostly silken flags of seeding water-sedges.

All still, all silent, 'tis a songless land,
That hears no music of the nightingale,
No sound of waters falling lone and grand
Through sighing forests to the lower vale,
No whisper in the grass, so wan, and grey, and pale.

When Earth was tottering in its infancy,
This rock, a drop of molten stone, was hurled
And tost on waves of flames like those we see
(Distinctly, though afar) evolved and whirled
A photosphere of fire around the Solar World.

Swift from the central deeps the lightning flare
Piercing the heart of Darkness like a spear,
Hot blasts of steam and vapour thunder'd through
The lurid blackness of the atmosphere.
A million years have passed, and left strange quiet her

Peace, the deep peace of universal death
Enshrouds the kindly mother-earth of old,
The air is dead, and stirs no living breath
To break these awful Silences that hold
The heart within their clutch, and numb the veins with cold.

My soul hath wept for Rest with longing tears,
Called it 'the perfect crown of human life'-
But now I shudder lest the coming years
Should be with these most gloomy terrors rife;
When palsied arms drop down outwearied with the strife.

May Age conduct me by a gentle hand
Beneath the shadows ever brooding o'er
The solemn twilight of the Evening Land,
Where man's discordant voices pierce no more,
But sleeping waters dream along a sleeping shore.

When I, when Youth has spent its fiery strength
And flickers low, may rest in quietness
Till on my waiting brow there falls at length
The deeper calm of the Death-Angel's kiss -
But not, oh God, such peace, such ghastly peace as this

O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 0 19 558003 6

For John Pule - Karlo Mila

For John Pule
- Karlo Mila


the poet told us
there was a beach
but a hurricane came
and swallowed it up

there was also a nation of people
but a New Zealand sponsored
hurricane
just as hungry
swept away people like grains of sand

with the help of
longremembered newfound family
he finds the old foundations
where hibiscus trees grow wild
with memories of his mother

using a new machete
he follows the old tracks
to a not-so-distant past
meeting his ancestors along the way
capturing them on canvas
mapping out their stories
so they will
never be lost

and his own children
will be able to find them





From Dream Fish Floating
http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/pasifika/mila1.asp

Our Mother IOur Mother Is In Love - Karlo Mila

Our Mother IOur Mother Is In Love
- Karlo Mila

You are so busy giving him the best of you
we are left with the scraps
fry up, boil up, bubble and squeak
we are throwing you to the birds

you are a partner now
a part of someone
all we have
are your lukewarm leftovers
we are throwing you to the birds

we are feeding you to the cat





From Dream Fish Floating


You are so busy giving him the best of you
we are left with the scraps
fry up, boil up, bubble and squeak
we are throwing you to the birds

you are a partner now
a part of someone
all we have
are your lukewarm leftovers
we are throwing you to the birds

we are feeding you to the cat





From Dream Fish Floating
http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/pasifika/mila2.asp

The Estuary - A. R. D. Fairburn

We sung this poem in an arrangement by Leonie Holmes. It was the piece of music which showed me the freedom of using a combination of graphic notation with a choir. I am ever grateful.

The Estuary - A. R. D. Fairburn

The wind has died, no motion now
in the summer's sleepy breath. Silver the sea-grass,
the shells and the driftwood, fixed in the moon's vast crystal.
Think: long after, when the walls of the small house
have collapsed upon us, each alone,
far gone the earth's invasion
the slow earth bedding and filling the bone,
this water will still be crawling up the estuary,
fingering its way among the channels, licking the stones;
and the floating shells, minute argosies
under the giant moon, still shoreward glide.
among the mangroves on the creeping tide.

The noise of gulls comes through the shining darkness
overt he dunes and the sea. Now the clouded moon
is warm in her nest of light. The world's a shell
where distant waves are murmuring of a time
beyond this time. Give me the ghost of your hand:
unreal, unread the dunes,
the sea, the mangroves, and the moon's white light,
unreal, beneath our naked feet, the sand.



O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

The Cave - James K. Baxter

The Cave
- James k. Baxter

In a hollow of the fields, where one would least expect it,
Stark and suddenly this limestone buttress:
A tree whose roots are bound about the stones,
Broad-leaved, hide well the crevice at the base
That leads, one guesses, to the sunless kingdom
Where souls endure the ache of Proserpine.

Entering where no man it seemed
Had come before, I found a rivulet
Beyond the rock door running in the dark.
Where it sprang from the heart of the hill
No one could tell: alone.
It ran like Time there in the dank silence.

I spoke once and my voice resounded
Among the many pillars. Further in
Were bones of sheep that strayed and died
In nether darkness, brown and water-worn.
The smell of earth was like a secret language
That dead men speak and we have long forgotten.

The whole weight of the hill hung over me.
Gladly I would have stayed there and been hidden
From every beast that moves beneath the sun,
From age's enmity and love's contagion:
But turned and climbed back to the barrier,
Pressed through and came to dazzling daylight out.



O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

Wild Bees - James K. Baxter

Wild Bees
- James K. Baxter

Often in summer, on a tarred bridge plank standing,
Or downstream between willows, a safe Ophelia drifting
In a rented boat - I had seen them comes and go,
Those wild bees, swift as tigers, their gauze wings a-glitter
In passionless industry, clustering black at the crevice
Of a rotten cabbage tree, where their hive was hidden low

But never strolled too near. Till one half-cloudy evening
Of ripe January, my friends and I
Came, gloved and masked to the eyes like plundering desperadoes,
To smoke them out. Quiet beside the stagnant river
We trod wet grasses down, hearing the crickets chitter
And waiting for light to drain from the wounded sky.

Before we reached the hive their sentries saw us
And sprang invisible through the darkening air.
Stabbed, and died in stinging. The hive woke. Poisonous fuming
Of sulphur filled the hollow trunk, and crawling
Blue flames sputtered - yet still their suicidal
Live raiders dived and clung to our hands and hair.

O it was Carthage under the Roman torches,
Or loud with flames and falling timber, Troy!
A job well botched. Half of the honey melted
And half the rest young grubs. Through earth-black smoldering ashes
And maimed bee groaning, we drew our plunder.
Little enough their gold, and slight our joy.

Fallen then the city of instinctive wisdom.
Tragedy is written distinct and small:
A hive burned on a cool night in summer.
But loss is a precious stone to me, a nectar
Distilled in time, preaching the truth of winter
To the fallen heart that does not cease to fall.


O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

Heemi - Hone Tuwhare

Heemi

(for James K. Baxter)

Hone Tuwhare

No point now my friend in telling

you my lady’s name.

She wished us well: ordered wheels

which spun my son and me like

comets through the lonely night.

You would have called her Aroha.

And when we picked up three young

people who’d hitched their way

from the Ninety-Mile Beach to be

with you, I thought: yes

your mana holds, Heemi. Your mana

is love. And suddenly the night

didn’t seem lonely anymore.

The car never played up at all.

And after we’d given it a second

gargle at the all-night bowser

She wished us well: offered wheels
it just zoomed on gulping

easily into the gear changes

up or down.

Because you’ve been over this road

many times before Heemi, you’d

know about the steady climb ahead

of us still. But once in the tricky

light, Tongariro lumbered briefly

out of the clouds to give us the old

‘up you’ sign. Which was real friendly.

When we levelled off a bit at the top

of the plateau, the engine heat couldn’t

keep the cold from coming in: the fog

swamping thick and slushy, and pressing

whitely against tired eye-balls.

Finally, when we’d eased ourselves

over a couple of humps and down down

the winding metalled road to the river

and Jerusalem, I knew things would be

all right. Glad that others from the

Mainland were arrowing toward the dawn

like us.

Joy for the brother sun chesting over
the brim of the land, and for the three
young blokes flaked out in the back seat
who would make it now, knowing that they
were not called to witness
some mysterious phenomenon of birth on
a dung-littered floor of a stable
but come simply to call
on a tired old mate in a tent
laid out in a box
with no money in the pocket
no fancy halo, no thump left in the old
ticker.

Mihi: Collected Poems (Penguin, 1987)

Truth - Eileen Duggan

Had issues posting. This was meant to have been posted Wednesday 6 April


Truth
- Eileen Duggan

Some can leave the truth unspoken.
Oh truth is light on such!
They may choose their time and season,
Nor feel it matters much.

I am not their judge, God help me!
Though I am of the crew
For whom is only truth or treason-
No choice between the two

But pity wrestles with my fury
Till, spent and dumb and dry
I envy bees which, barbed with reason,
Give the whole sting and die





O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century new zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.

Te Whetu Plains - Edward Tregear

Te Whetu Plains
-Edward Tregear

A lonely rock above a midnight plain,
A sky whose moonlit darkness flies
No shadow from the 'Children of the Rain',
A stream whose double crescent far-off lies,
And seems to glitter back the silver of skies.

The table-lands stretch step by step below
In giant terraces, their deeper ledges
Banded by blackened swamps (that, near, I know
Convolvulus-entwined) whose whitened edges
Are ghostly silken flags of seeding water-sedges.

All still, all silent, 'tis a songless land,
That hears no music of the nightingale,
No sound of waters falling lone and grand
Through sighing forests to the lower vale,
No whisper in the grass, so wan, and grey, and pale.

When Earth was tottering in its infancy,
This rock, a drop of molten stone, was hurled
And tost on waves of flames like those we see
(Distinctly, though afar) evolved and whirled
A photosphere of fire around the Solar World.

Swift from the central deeps the lightning flare
Piercing the heart of Darkness like a spear,
Hot blasts of steam and vapour thunder'd through
The lurid blackness of the atmosphere.
A million years have passed, and left strange quiet her

Peace, the deep peace of universal death
Enshrouds the kindly mother-earth of old,
The air is dead, and stirs no living breath
To break these awful Silences that hold
The heart within their clutch, and numb the veins with cold.

My soul hath wept for Rest with longing tears,
Called it 'the perfect crown of human life'-
But now I shudder lest the coming years
Should be with these most gloomy terrors rife;
When palsied arms drop down outwearied with the strife.

May Age conduct me by a gentle hand
Beneath the shadows ever brooding o'er
The solemn twilight of the Evening Land,
Where man's discordant voices pierce no more,
But sleeping waters dream along a sleeping shore.

When I, when Youth has spent its fiery strength
And flickers low, may rest in quietness
Till on my waiting brow there falls at length
The deeper calm of the Death-Angel's kiss -
But not, oh God, such peace, such ghastly peace as this

O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 0 19 558003 6

High Country Weather - James K. Baxter

High Country Weather
- James K. Baxter

Alone we are born,
And die alone.
Yet see the red-gold cirrus,
Over snow-mountain shine.

Upon the upland,
Ride easy stranger.
Surrender to the sky,
Your heart of anger.