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
Increase and multiply
Bantams golden and black inhabit
the bamboo grove. I wake at dawn
to the cry of the strident cock.
As my coffee draws he mounts
one of the hens on the dewy grass;
hidden away the second
hen broods over her clutch
and the third parades her young.
Day after day this brilliant
make-believe of order and renewal.
It is a political economy:
power, obligation, a chain
of being, total community.
It is a reformed theology: faith
alone and entire, election
to grace or to wrath. Exemplary
paradigms of divine favour
cry out, walk proudly, sit enrapt.
A bloody feather with a shred
of inedible tissue asks
of providence an unheeded question.