To Charles Brasch
Preface
Part One
Sleep Will Come Singly • A Ballad of Bad Omens • The Tempest • Sea Legend • Fire Without Phoenix • The Time of the Eagle • And I, In Arcady • The Beachcomber • For One Flying • A Handful of Sea Shells • A Figure at the Window • Island
Part Two
Ceremony of Pain • Dream • Soldier's Pay • Monastic Ruins • A Performance of Death & The Maiden • At a Holy Well • From a Train in the Midlands • In Radcliffe Square, Oxford • The Streets of My City • In the Fields of My Father's Youth • Colophon—The Poet to his Book
Source: Oliver, W. H., Fire Without Phoenix: Poems 1946-1954. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1957
Electronic source: Fire Without Phoenix: a TEI-conformant transcription
All poems © W. H. Oliver
From a Train in the Midlands
Red soil gapes in the cutting,
Grey slag heaped on its brim
Fashions the earth's moon-crater;
A mine wheel stands at the brim.
There are houses beyond the slag heap
With gardens down to the line
Where a tired hen scratches a livelihood,
A small dog barks at the train;
And beyond the houses a city
Grey and red in its brick,
A camp the wrong side of Jordan
Clustered around the pit.
Mine wheel, crater, houses;
Earth gives up her store;
The mine shaft probes her riches;
Her body is laid out bare
And prepared for a decent disposal
By women with working hands;
Wrapped in grey folds of cotton,
Smothered in swaddling bands.
Men with their broken fingers
Cut a stone for her tomb
As grey and bloody as corpses
To keep her from their home;
The preachers of little Bethel
Curse her to her grave
As idle, profligate, vicious,
Too old in sin to save.
She is murdered, buried, forgotten.
But around the heaps of slack
Children flower like fennel
And threaten to bring her back.