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
Augury
There are no signs. The sky is entirely bland
and empty of birds. But even if they were flying,
as soon they will be back to night shelter,
even if it were now the season for migration
and the echelons were assembling for departure,
no-one could find patterns in their flying
and predictions in the patterns and a scrap of assurance
to last at the utter limit till the forecast failed.
There has never been a portent but only
a populated earth and an empty sky.
One bird, if it chances to pass, tells more clearly
of a condition so common it needs no prediction:
two narrow wings lifting the great firmament
and only for a moment a fragment of song.