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
Silent revolution
Try it out with a bird or a fish. Though a woman would do.
They are well used to handling such weighty matters.
Like all the lesser creatures they have been
serious-minded since the first daub made them symbols.
Suppose, suppose, the bird took flight from the lectern
and swept through the nave wingtip to either wall,
or out of the font rose, huge, Leviathan
and it was all quite suddenly submarine?
Suppose, to bring it closer home, the mirror
you looked in every morning was removed
and there your image stood quite unsupported
by any frame, and subtly changed in ways
that changed the more you looked, would you
be able, even, to wonder who was there?