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
Rongopai
In Gisborne where poverty
is a state of mind more
than a matter of money
bleached brown surfers
walk on the waters
where tribes fought each other
and us for a future
no-one could guess at
and now is not wanted.
Idly in a garden
of giant exotics
under whose alien stare
garish pakeha colours
crowded into a still
snapshot to take away
(always away there is
no here and nowhere near)
I thought of Rongopai
this side of Ormond where
Te Kooti was to have rested.
He was chased away by the whites.
He had won many battles
translated much of the Bible
founded a new religion
was soldier saint and scholar
but still outside the pale
for poverty is a state
of mind and it was partly
a matter of someone's money.
At Rongopai I remember
wild bees hived in the eaves
the tukutuku had eyes
the missionary passed with his book
the settler laid axe to the trunk
the racehorse cleared the hurdle
long stemmed flowers twined
in and out of each other
the painted ladies wore black
demurely up to their throats
the ancestors gazed benignly
even upon a stranger
a truth I did not grasp
was being plainly spoken.