and many unsold, or lying about the streets
bearing the marks of boot-protectors;
a crucified ape, preached by Darwinian bishops,
guarded by traitorous pens, handed the vinegar
of a ‘belief in the essential goodness of human nature’.
VII
The army of the unliving, the cells of the cancer:
small sleek men rubbing their hands in vestibules,
re-lighting cigar-butts, changing their religions;
dabblers in expertise, licensed to experiment
on the vile body of the State; promoters of companies;
efficiency experts (unearned excrement
of older lands, oranges sucked dry),
scourges of a kindly and credulous race;
economists, masters of dead language;
sorners, bureausites; titled upstarts; men
with dry palms and a sense of humour; hagglers, hucksters,
buyers and sellers, retchings
of commerce, spawn of greed; holders of mortgages
on slum farms where children milk
with chilblained fingers; dwellers
in warm, rich flats, forced growth of luscious weed;
old wealthy women, buyers of etchings, fondlers
of dogs, holders of stocks
in sweatshops where the young virgins,
the daughters of the poor,
housed with machines endure the hands of clocks;
councillors and legislators,
toads in plush;
octogenarians who have forgotten
the heat of their youth, giving the sadic twist
to laws of marriage and divorcement, obtruding
the rancour of a swollen prostate,
the jealousy of a withered scrotum,
upon the affairs of springtime;
and those who embrace their misery
in small closed rooms,
sucking carious teeth, sniffing
the odour of themselves, gentlemen’s relish:
‘You must not confiscate our sufferings,
they are private poetry.’
VIII
Above the city’s heap, life’s bones
licked clean, void of desire,
white clouds like images of fear
move in the barren blue; the sun’s cold fire
shines in the infinite crystal
the ghastly clear
frozen emptiness of air
and formless being above the walls,
beyond the concrete edges of despair.
A death has been arranged and will take place
none knows where or when, none cares
how soon the wind will whisper ‘Soon, soon,’
shaking the dead leaves in the city square
at noon, in darkening air.
IX
This is our paper city, built
on the rock of debt, held fast
against all winds by the paperweight of debt.
The crowds file slowly past, or stop and stare,
and here and there, dull-eyed, the idle stand
in clusters in the mouths of gramophone shops
in a blare of music that fills the crumpled air
with paper flowers and artificial scents
and painless passion in a heaven
of fancied love.
The women come
from the bargain shops and basements
at dusk, as gazelles from drinking;
the men buy evening papers, scan them
for news of doomsday, light their pipes:
and the night sky, closing over, covers like a hand
the barbaric yawn of a young and wrinkled land.
X
Men and women, hands and faces; a nation established
by statute-makers, geographers, census-takers;
living like fleas in surface dust;
begetting children,
grist for the system, multiplying souls
in the jaws of chaos.
The living saddled with debt. A load of debt for the foetus.
A load laid by for the moment of delight
hidden in the future, yet to be made flesh,
trapped in the net of statistical laws, caught
in the calculations of the actuaries.
And over all the hand of the usurer,
bland angel of darkness,
mild and triumphant and much looked up to.
ALBUM LEAVES
Imperial
In the first days, in the forgotten calendars,
came the seeds of the race, the forerunners:
offshoots, outcasts, entrepreneurs,
architects of Empire, romantic adventurers;
and the famished, the multitude of the poor;
crossed parallels of boredom, tropics
of hope and fear, losing the pole-star, suffering
world of water, chaos of wind and sunlight,
and the formless image in the mind;
sailed under Capricorn to see for ever
the arc of the sun to northward.
They shouted at the floating leaf,
laughed with joy at the promise of life,
hope becoming belief, springing
alive, alight, gulls at the masthead crying,
the crag splitting the sky, slowly
towering out of the sea, taking
colour and shape, and the land
swelling beyond; noises
of water among rocks, voices singing.
Haven of hunger; landfall of hope;
goal of ambition, greed and despair.
In tangled forests under the gloom
of leaves in the green twilight,
among the habitations of the older gods
they walked, with Christ beside them,
and an old enemy at hand, one whose creed
flourished in virgin earth. They divided the land;
some for their need, and some
for aimless, customary greed
that hardened with the years, grew taut
and knotted like a fist. Flower and weed
scattered upon the breeze
their indiscriminate seed; on every hillside fought
God’s love against the old antagonist.
They change the sky but not their hearts who cross the seas.
These islands;
the remnant peaks of a lost continent,
roof of an old world, molten droppings
from earth’s bowels, gone cold;
ribbed with rock, resisting the sea’s corrosion
for an age, and an age to come. Of three races
the home: two passing in conquest
or sitting under the leaves, or on shady doorsteps
with quiet hands, in old age, childless.
And we, the latest: their blood on our hands: scions
of men who scaled ambition’s
tottering slopes, whose desires
encompassed earth and heaven: we have prospered greatly,
we, the destined race, rulers of conquered isles,
sprouting like bulbs in warm darkness, putting out
white shoots under the wet sack of Empire.
Back Street
A girl comes out of a doorway in the morning
with hair uncombed, treading with care
on the damp bricks, picks up the milk,
stares skyward with sleepy eyes;
returns to the dewy step; leaves
with the closing of the door
silence under narrow eaves
the tragic scent of violets on the morning air
and jonquils thrust through bare earth here and there.
At ten o’clock a woman comes out
and leans against the wall
beside the fig-tree hung with washing; listens
for the postman’s whistle. Soon he passes,
leaves no letter.
She turns a s
hirt upon the barren tree
and pads back to the house as ghost to tomb.
No children since the first. The room
papered in ‘Stars’, with Jubilee pictures
pasted over the mantel, spattered with fat.
Up the street
the taxi-drivers lounging in a knot
beside the rank of shining cars
discuss the speed of horses
as mariners the stars in their courses.
One Race, One Flag
Smith
a refugee from the Black Country
suffers the insults of the foreman
that his family may live
in the discomfort to which they are accustomed
with deductions by the Commissioner of Taxes.
Smith has four sons,
hands-in-pockets, fronting chaos;
limbs of a ring-barked tree, losing sap.
Smith is an English immigrant.
Consider the curious fate
of the English immigrant:
his wages were taken from him
and exported to the colonies;
sated with abstinence, gorged on deprivation,
he followed them: to be confronted on arrival
with the ghost of his back wages, a load of debt;
the bond of kinship, the heritage of Empire.
Wedding Group
After the benediction and the confetti,
the photographer’s parlour, the cakes and lemonade,
the bridegroom, 33, Christ’s age crucified,
clerk in a bank
standing beside the bride and her best friend
discussing the beauty of the ceremony
with nervous voices, words packed in politeness
of sawdust, glumly awaiting
the nuptial taxi:
married so late they should have had many dreams,
midnight illusion, habitual fantasy: waking
not from the beauty and torpor of a dream in spring
to halcyon dawn, soft warmth of living blood,
love’s aftermath in the hollow of a shoulder,
but from the excited nightmare of the self-cheated.
She, the friend, member of a literary circle,
sniggers and spreads her claws: At what hotel
do you intend to Stope for your honeymoon, te-he?
He, tapping his cigarette: No children for us
until the Budget is balanced. God save the King.
[…]
The Possessor
On my land grew a green tree
that gave shade to the weary,
peace to my children, rest to the travel-stained;
and the waters ran beneath, the river of life.
My people drank of the waters after their labour,
had comfort of the tree in the heat of noon,
lying in summer grass ringed round with milk-white flowers,
gathering strength, giving their bodies
to the motion of the earth.
I cut down the tree, and made posts
and fenced my land,
I banished my people and turned away the traveller;
and now I share my land with sparrows that trespass
upon my rood of air. The earth
is barren, the stream is dry; the sun has blackened
grass that was green and springing, flowers that were fair.
Conversation in the Bush
‘Observe the young and tender frond
‘of this punga: shaped and curved
‘like the scroll of a fiddle: fit instrument
‘to play archaic tunes.’
‘I see
‘the shape of a coiled spring.’
ELEMENTS
I
In the summer we rode in the clay country,
the road before us trembling in the heat
and on the warm wind the scent of tea-tree,
grey and wind-bitten in winter, odorous under summer noon,
with spurts of dust under the hoofs
and a crackle of gorse on the wayside farms.
At dusk the sun fell down in violet hills
and evening came and we turned our horses
homeward through dewy air.
In autumn, kindness of earth, covering life,
mirrored stillness,
peace of mind, and time to think;
good fishing, and burdened orchards. Winter come,
headlands loomed in mist,
hills were hailswept, flowers were few;
and when we rode on the mountains in frosty weather
the distant ranges ran like blue veins through the land.
In spring we thrust our way through the bush,
through the ferns in the deep shadow angled with sunbeams,
roamed by streams in the bush, by the scarred stones
and the smooth stones water-worn, our shoulder wet
with rain from the shaken leaves.
O lovely time! when bliss was taken
as the bird takes nectar from the flower.
Happy the sunlit hour, the frost and the heat.
Hearts poised at a star’s height
moved in a cloudless world
like gulls afloat above islands.
Smoke out of Europe, death blown
on the wind, and a cloak of darkness for the spirit.
II
Land of mountains and running water
rocks and flowers
and the leafy evergreen, O natal earth,
the atoms of your children
are bonded to you for ever:
though the images of your beauty lie in shadow,
time nor treachery, nor the regnant evil,
shall efface from the hearts of your children
from their eyes and from their fingertips
the remembrance of good.
Treading your hills, drinking your waters,
touching your greenness, they are content, finding
peace at the heart of strife
and a core of stillness in the whirlwind.
Absent, estranged from you, they are unhappy,
crying for you continually
in the night of their exile.
III
To prosper in a strange land
taking cocktails at twilight behind the hotel curtains,
buying cheap and selling dear, acquiring customs,
is to bob up and down like a fisherman’s gaudy float
in a swift river.
He who comes back returns
to no ruin of gold nor riot of buds,
moan of doves in falling woods
nor wind of spring shaking the hedgerows,
heartsache, strangling sweetness: pictures
of change, extremes of time and growth,
making razor-sharp the tenses,
waking remembrance, torturing sense;
home-coming, returns only
to the dull green, hider of bones,
changeless, save in the slight spring
when the bush is peopled with flowers,
sparse clusters of white and yellow
on the dull green, like laughter in court;
and in summer when the coasts
bear crimson bloom, sprinkled like blood
on the lintel of the land.
IV
Fairest earth,
fount of life, giver of bodies,
deep well of our delight, breath of desire,
let us come to you
barefoot, as befits love,
as the boy to the trembling girl,
as the child to the mother:
seeking before all things the honesty of substance,
touch of soil and wind and rock,
frost and flower and water,
the honey of the senses, the food
of love’s imagining; and the most intimate
touch of love, that turns to being;
deriving
wisdom, and the knowledge of necessity;
building thereon, stone by stone,
the rational architecture of truth, to house
the holy flame, that is neither reason nor unreason
but the thing given,
the flame that burns blue in the stillness, hovering
between the green wood of the flesh and the smoke of death.
Fair earth, we have broken our idols:
and after the days of fire we shall come to you
for the stones of a new temple.
(1938)
Douglas Stewart, ‘Mending the Bridge’
Burnished with copper light, burnished,
The men are brutal: their bodies jut out square
Massive as rock in the lanterns’ stormy glare
Against the devastation of the dark.
Now passionate, as if to gouge the stark
Quarry of baleful light still deeper there
With slow gigantic chopping rhythm they hack,
Beat back and crumple up and spurn the black
Live night, the marsh-black sludgy air.
And clamour the colour of copper light
Swings from their hammering, and speeds, and breaks
Darkness to clots and spattering light, and flakes
Oily, like dazzling snow and storms of oil.
The night that never sleeps, quickens. The soil,
The stones and the grass are alive. The thrush awakes,
Huddles, and finds the leaves gone hard and cool.
The cows in the fields are awake, restless; the bull
Restless. The dogs. A young horse snorts and shakes.
Beneath the square of glaring light
The river still is muttering of flood,
The dark day when thick with ugly mud,
Swirling with logs and swollen beasts (and some
Still alive, drowning) it had come
Snarling, a foul beast chewing living cud,
And grappled with the bridge and tried to rend it,
So now these stronger brutes must sweat to mend it
Labouring in light like orange blood.
Men labour in the city so,
With naked fore-arms singed with copper light
And strangeness on them as with stone they fight,
Each meet for fear, and even the curt drill
Mysterious, as trees and a dark hill.
But these are stronger, these oppose their might
To storm and flood and all the land’s black power.
Burnished with sweat and lanterns now they tower
Monstrous against the marshes of the night.
(1936)
Denis Glover, ‘The Road Builders’
Rolling along far roads on holiday wheels
now wonder at their construction, the infinite skill
that balanced the road to the gradient of the hill,
the precision, the planning, the labour it all reveals.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 52