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
Apocalypse
Sparrows each dusk
fly to the bamboo
city of fluttering
wings, fall silent
at dark and at dawn
stir lightly alive.
Not one falls
but the father…
whose providence
is this broad bushy
many mansioned
impenetrable city
of leaf and stem.
But let a child
pass and a cloud
of witnesses flies
from the wrath which was
to come and terribly has.