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.