Poor Richard
dear kanga
Leave Report
Sabbatical • Departure • Arrival • Elgin Crescent • A Shot of the British Museum • At the Victoria and Albert • The Book of Kells • At Kew • Through Pisa • Return to Iffley • Mordros
Source: Poor Richard: Poems. Wellington: Port Nicholson Press, 1982
Electronic source: Poor Richard: a TEI-conformant transcription
All poems © W. H. Oliver
4
Stiff in memorial bronze he keeps
an arm held high to heaven so the sun
shall never set and the citadel be taken.
Great beard trimmed down beer-belly decently
smoothed out and shaped St Richard sees
the city stretch and stir. When he was young
the ribs stood out of his side like a hayrake
strenuous and taut with appetites
neglected by the father of the people
gesturing in the grounds of parliament
with the seagulls taking aim.
Immortality brings its surprises:
a poet perched astride
the Cook Strait ferryboat like Aphrodite
hails him as the proletarian hero;
a solemn ostentation of descendants
over the way at prayer in the cathedral;
a reminder from the top of a tall column
‘O ethnic rider galloper supreme’
that he is better off in bronze than those
whose blood and breath ran out by ditch and dune.