Reference Points
Stranger within • Generation gap • Midwinter spring • Silent revolution • Trees, travelling • Under the wave • Magnolia • Augury • Four elements • Peacocks • Old house • Rainbird • Apocalypse
Histories
Historian • Portraits • The janitor • Ancestors • Yesterday's loss • Counter-revolution • Prayer of an elder • Robert Lowell • Social control • Waitomo • Parihaka • Rongopai
Myths and Emblems
Counter talk • The empty chair • The candle • Wave and shell • Increase and multiply • November 1978 • Rumpelstiltskin • Thumbelina • The swineherd • A Japanese tale • Solstice
Source: Out of Season: Poems. Wellington; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980
Electronic source: Out of Season: a TEI-conformant transcription
All poems © W. H. Oliver
Midwinter spring
A warm wind from the south: no-one
expected that out of antarctica,
summer from the suspended heart of winter.
It is to be given childhood once again,
a country school with Shelley, Keats and Browning
moping for Italy in northern cold,
more than given back, made to come true.
Icefields grow lilies, vines and oranges
break through the scree, rocks split where olives root.
The wind begins there, crosses a violet sea
broken by islands white with surf and marble,
awakens senses cramped by winter frost
and speaks like Shelley in a frozen school
of life not far away, just within reach.
Take care you do not disbelieve the wind,
nor fail to heed the lessons no-one meant
to teach you in a wintry childhood. Each
remains more true than all the contradictions
the alien worlds of weather and of nurture
impose on you. Out of the south comes warmth
and life out of the shade of sterile order.