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
Historian
Hard at your lifework building a monumental
footnote, did you not pause and sigh to be again
the testy prophet slipping into the spaces
between the words you chose and the ones you rejected
a silent sermon, an implicit denunciation?
You rang ironic changes like an irreverant
imp in the bell tower making worshippers wonder
if indeed it was Sunday and time for matins
and not the beginnings of some less decorous rite.
In the end you caused little disturbance.
The ignorant and the complacent keep their places;
they give your great book to each other on solemn occasions,
calf-bound, gold-lettered. Once you had words,
sly and malicious, for fools: now more than ever our need.