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
Yesterday's loss
Driftwood, sea-smoothed, shape of a hook,
drawing the past, tree, river, ocean, storm,
out of dark reaches, now lying
bland on a beach to catch a child's eye.
So Maui brought the island up. Cook
with long barbed lines across a map
hauled it to Europe. God's men and mammon's
dragged the shallows for a human cargo.
Smooth and harmless in a child's hand.
Sharpen it, cast it on a longer
line in the past, bring to the beach
yesterday's loss, tomorrow's enormous burden
heavy on the fragile line: a new island
heaved from the trench of drowned hopes.