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
Counter-revolution
Did it go wrong just about a hundred
years ago? A ramshackle self-appointed
cast-off elite of first comers,
promoters, bent lawyers and sham doctors
set it up for themselves, a gentry of sorts,
saw it collapse and crept away with slim gains.
The cities grew, married men left home,
children were tall and wild, women restless.
Something had to be done. Seddon the burly
village policeman, a pattern for the future,
rose like a cork, admonishing finger aloft,
ponderously sly, licking his stub of a pencil,
selecting and rejecting, always with good humour,
not harsh in the least, but in the end obscene.