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
A Japanese tale
The masks have fallen.
Better now to be like the woman
in the Japanese tale who drew
her hand down over her face
and revealed the wall of an egg.
In a child's picture book
it is too elegant a nightmare.
The truth is harder.
The wall is cracked, white
spills and swells like a tear,
a streak of yellow drains the centre.
But there were two in the tale.
The listener said, Like this?
and slowly drew her hand
over her exquisite face. Like this?
It was worse then; there was
a thread of red, of unborn blood.