In a flax basket
Or shoot duck or fish,
And fill out meals
With good ship’s biscuit.
He Talks to a Friend
Hot springs I’ve found
Over on the other side,
And in the Red Hills
A lode of pure iron
Three feet wide.
Rubies and garnets
In odd patches,
And in one place shale oil
You can light with a box of matches.
The gold? Oh yes, I’ve got a good clue,
But you’d hardly expect
Me to tell you.
To the Coast
I
There’s no horse this time,
Going’s too rough.
It’s a man with an eighty-pound pack,
And that’s more than enough.
Always the colour, in quartz or the river,
Never the nuggets as large as a liver.
Five years ago I tried this route
Taking the left branch. Now try the right.
It’ll mean tramping half the night
Before the weather breaks, turning
Tarns into lakes.
The colour is elusive, like streaks
Of wind-cloud. Gold dust must
Come from somewhere. But where?
Neither river nor mountain speaks.
II
The divide should make a decision here,
Parting the melting trickle of snow
As a woman parts her hair.
And finding a way through this muddle
Of snow and rock on the saddle
My intention is to crawl
Down the far side’s precipitous wall
To more of the colour.
What metal lies
Between those granite thighs,
What parturition of earth
Yields the golden miraculous birth?
Bee carries golden pollen
Mountain and mist breed schist,
And the swollen river runs sullen
With the dust I have missed.
III
Jacksons Bay on the Tasman, the end
Of many a search round many a bend.
Does the terminus of the sea
Contain my mystery,
Throwing back on the beach
Grains of gold
I have followed from sea to sea
Thirty times and again
Since I was thirty years old?
A seaboot full of gold, tempest tossed,
They hid somewhere on the coast
When their ship was lost.
But back to the mountains!
I know
The fire of gold
Lies under that cold snow.
Conversation Piece
Where are you off to, Bill?
Surely the river’s too full.
Me and my billy don’t worry:
We take the track for the sea,
And there’s no hurry.
But why are you leaving, Bill,
When you’ve just fetched up?
Stay for a bite and a sup
Or a few square meals.
I’ve tea and sugar and flour,
And inside the hour
I’m heading into the hills.
Bill, have you struck it rich?
No—but you never saw such
Promise of colour, not a doubt
Of it—till the cloudburst
Drove me out of it.
Bill, what will you do
When you strike it?
Me? I might go to town
—I don’t like it—
But I’d cut a bit of a dash,
Buy a billycock hat and maybe
Go on the bash.
But I really need
Some tough new boots
And a stout pair of breeks
For crossing the rivers
When the weather breaks.
Soliloquies
I
The next slip I encounter
May yield the reward
Of the mother lode
Surely by this time owed
By the country I’ve proved so well.
Who can tell
When the miraculous vein will open
And the golden rain
Cascade into the pan?
II
Curse these mountains, brutes
That send down granite roots
Nourished on the gold
I may never behold.
Someone may find me dead
By the richest lode
With a prize in my hand
That I’m disallowed.
III
When God made this place
He made mountains and fissures
Hostile, vicious, and turned
Away His face.
Did He mean me to burn out my heart
In a forty-year search
In this wilderness
Of snow and black birch,
With only a horse for company
Beating on a white tympany?
Is this some penance
For a sin I never knew,
Or does my Grail
Still lie in the snow or hail?
Yet it might be His purpose to plant
The immaculate metal
Where the stoutest hearts quail.
IV
They’ll not laugh this time
When I come home
With something in my poke.
They’ve been saying too long
That Arawata Bill’s just a joke.
The fools. There’s more gold beneath
These rivers and mountains
Than in all their clattering teeth.
The Crystallised Waves
Snow is frozen cloud
Tumbled to the ravine,
The mist and the mountain-top
Lying between.
The cloud turns to snow or mist,
The mist to the stream,
The stream seeks out the ocean
All in a geographer’s dream.
What are the mountains on high
But the crystallised waves of the sea,
And what is the white-topped wave
But a mountain that liquidly weaves?
The water belongs to the mountain.
Belongs to the deep;
The mountain beneath the water
Suckles oceans in sleep.
How are the tops in the dawn?
The Little Sisters
The Little Sisters of the Poor
Take me in without demur.
Good meals and a clean bed
And a pillow to my head.
Do they, curing my body’s ills,
Know I must go back to the hills?
It sets me dreaming
To watch their gowns as black as birch
And their white wimples gleaming.
The End
It got you at last, Bill,
The razor-edge that cut you down
Not in the gullies, nor on the pass
But in a bed in town.
R.I.P. where no gold lies
But in your own questing soul
Rich in faith and a wild surmise.
You should have been told
Only in you was the gold:
Mountains and rivers paid you no fee,
Mountain melting to the river,
River to the sea.
(1953)
James K. Baxter, ‘Poem in the Matukituki Valley’
Some few yards from the hut the standing beeches
Let fall their dead limbs, overgrown
With feathered moss and filigree of bracken.
The rotted wood splits clean and hard
Close-grained to the driven axe, with sound of water
Sibilant falling and high nested birds.
In winter blind with snow; but in full summer
The forest bla
nket sheds its cloudy pollen
And cloaks a range in undevouring fire.
Remote the land’s heart. Though the wild scrub cattle
Acclimatised, may learn
Shreds of her purpose, or the taloned kea.
For those who come as I do, half-aware,
Wading the swollen
Matukituki waist-high in snow water,
And stumbling where the mountains throw their dice
Of boulders huge as houses, or the smoking
Cataract flings its arrows on our path—
For us the land is matrix and destroyer,
Resentful, darkly known
By sunset omens, low words heard in branches;
Or where the red deer lift their innocent heads
Snuffing the wind for danger,
And from our footfall’s menace bound in terror.
Three emblems of the heart I carry folded
As charms against flood water, sliding shale:
Pale gentian, lily, and bush orchid.
The peaks too have names to suit their whiteness,
Stargazer and Moonraker,
A sailor’s language and a mountaineer’s.
And those who sleep in close bags fitfully
Besieged by wind in a snowline bivouac—
The carrion parrot with red underwing
Clangs on the roof by night, and daybreak brings
Raincloud on purple ranges, light reflected
Stainless from crumbling glacier, dazzling snow.
Do they not, clay in that unearthly furnace,
Endure the hermit’s peace
And mindless ecstasy? Blue-lipped crevasse
And smooth rock chimney straddling—a communion
With what eludes our net—Leviathan
Stirring to ocean birth our inland waters?
Sky’s purity; the altar cloth of snow
On deathly summits laid; or avalanche
That shakes the rough moraine with giant laughter;
Snowplume and whirlwind—what are these
But His flawed mirror who gave the mountain strength
And dwells in holy calm, undying freshness?
Therefore we turn, hiding our souls’ dullness
From that too blinding glass: turn to the gentle
Dark of the human daydream, child and wife,
Patience of stone and soil, the lawful city
Where man may live, and no wild trespass
Of what’s eternal shake his grave of time.
(1949; 1953)
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, ‘The Return’
And again I see the long pouring headland,
And smoking coast with the sea high on the rocks,
The gulls flung from the sea, the dark wooded hills
Swarming with mist, and mist low on the sea.
And on the surf-loud beach the long spent hulks,
The mats and splintered masts, the fires kindled
On the wet sand, and men moving between the fires,
Standing or crouching with backs to the sea.
Their heads finely shrunken to a skull, small
And delicate, with small black rounded beaks;
Their antique bird-like chatter bringing to mind
Wild locusts, bees, and trees filled with wild honey—
And, sweet as incense-clouds, the smoke rising, the fire
Spitting with rain, and mist low with rain—
Their great eyes glowing, their rain-jewelled, leaf-green
Bodies leaning and talking with the sea behind them:
Plant gods, tree gods, gods of the middle world …. Face downward
And in a small creek mouth all unperceived,
The drowned Dionysus, sand in his eyes and mouth,
In the dim tide lolling—beautiful, and with the last harsh
Glare of divinity from lip and broad brow ebbing …
The long-awaited! And the gulls passing over with shrill cries;
And the fires going out on the thundering sand;
And the mist, and the mist moving over the land.
(1950)
Mary Stanley, ‘Per Diem et per Noctem’
Birds in their oratory of leaves
clamour at morning over my love.
All waters praise him, the sea harbours
from harm, all islands are his neighbour
and rain at daybreak feathers his peace
softer than pillows or my kiss.
O may his lucky hand at noon
pluck down the sun, all day his keen
eye be darkened by no cloud.
Sky-walker, the lonely hawk, applaud
his purpose, the equipoise among
cliff and rock, his difficult song.
O never may night confound or send
him lost into that hinterland
far from my coasts. Where is your moon,
Endymion, trimming her thin
flame to light my love? The world
lifts its shoulder to shelter him curled
in the lap of sleep. By falling star
I wish all his tomorrows fair.
(1953)
Mary Stanley, ‘Night Piece’
Turning from sleep I seek the final word
of love, the world that weighs my lids and binds
my tongue to silence, while the darkness winds
its spool of hours and in my side the sword
peels off the flesh, lays bare the bone. We heard
a voice over the northern sea, and hinds
in the enchanted wood. The fable blinds
the beggar prince, cages his golden bird.
Not here, in any angel, lyre or rose
I find the touchstone phrase but in the kiss
that knocks along the blood and, wordless, knows
its way of tears and holds dumb hands to bless.
(1953)
Eileen Duggan, ‘Night’
You are the still caesura
That breaks a line in two;
A quiet leaf of darkness
Between two flowers of blue;
A little soft indrawing
Between two sighs;
A slender spit of silence
Between two seas of cries.
(1951)
The Moral Plane of War
John Mulgan, from Report on Experience
New Zealanders, when they went to war, found it easier to get down to the moral plane of a German soldier, and were even capable of thinking a ruse or two ahead in the game of total war. Englishmen spent some time and casualties in finding war ungentlemanly before they tossed the rules overboard and moved in on the same basis. I don’t know that the cunning and professionalism of my fellow countrymen is to be commended on abstract grounds, but these are comfortable qualities to have about in wartime. Oddly enough I don’t think these things affected their natural kindliness, nor the kind of ethics that they expect from people in private life. It was only that they looked on war as a game, and a game to New Zealanders is something that they play to win, against the other side and the referee, if necessary. Personally, I still prefer games that way and find them more interesting.
It wasn’t always the football season in New Zealand. After winter the sun came in. In the sun the fern hills grew very brown and the clay roads yellow with dust. The deep green of the bush in the mountains never changed but a blue mist came over them. Out to sea the gulf islands looked very friendly.
Winter and summer, the New Zealanders were fairly happy. I don’t know that they were more happy in any absolute sense than Greek peasants or Czech factory workers, but they were physically very well, which gave them a start. They moved in a good world and knew it and liked it. In the times about which I’m writing now, in the peace and prosperity years between the end of the First World War and the great depression, nothing appeared to be wrong with the world as we saw it from New Zealand. The only troubles that people had were personal and domestic.
I know that personal and domestic troubles can hurt as deeply as any other kind of ill-fortune; but there is this difference in them, that a man feels them all the time as being subject to his personal endeavour. He understands them as being due to some human agency and though he may not find the solution, he knows that the solution is also personal and domestic.
It would be a mistake to look back and say that those were the good days, those golden twenties when the sun was shining. They were the dumb, unconscious days, in a world of our boyhood that will never return to us again. But the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts and those years seem to have expanded now until they fill a larger place than they deserve. It is also clear to me now that not only our youth made those years golden. They were easy years, and after they passed, from the time of the depression onwards, we were caught up in events that never allowed us to move with the same sense of freedom that we had then.
[…]
All this happened a long time ago and New Zealand is a far country, now, while I am writing this. It is distant not only on the other side of the world at war, but also distant in time. If I am remembering anything, it is not only of people that I care for and remember and hope some day to see again, but also of places and a peculiar memory of scent and light and sound that is the tide coming in at early morning at Manganese Point, or the surf at evening by Whatipu, or a bush river in flood somewhere north of Karamea. I know that if I went back now none of these things would seem the same, and the country would be different and full of a new lot of people. But there is no harm nor any difficulty in remembering.
Afterwards, a long time afterwards, I met the New Zealanders again, in the desert below Ruweisat ridge, the summer of 1942. It was like coming home. They carried New Zealand with them across the sands of Libya. This was the division that had saved the campaign of 1941 at Sidi Rezegh. The next year, when Rommel came into Egypt, the same division drove down from Syria and up along the coast road against the tide of a retreating army to meet him, and waited for him near Mersah Matruh. They held there for three days. By the evening of the third day, the whole Afrika Corps had lapped round them and was closing in. Ordered to come out, the New Zealanders attacked by night, led out their transport through the gaps they cleared, boarded it, and drove back to Alamein. Through all the days of a hot and panic-stricken July they fought Rommel to a standstill in a series of attacks along Ruweisat ridge. They helped to save Egypt, and led the break-through at Alamein to turn the war.
They were mature men, these New Zealanders of the desert, quiet and shrewd and sceptical. They had none of the tired patience of the Englishman, nor that automatic discipline that never questions orders to see if they make sense. Moving in a body, detached from their homeland, they remained quiet and aloof and self-contained. They had confidence in themselves, such as New Zealanders rarely have, knowing themselves as good as the best the world could bring against them, like a football team in a more deadly game, coherent, practical, successful.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 61