ELEGY AT THE YEAR'S END

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 760, 12 February 1954, Page 5

ELEGY AT THE YEAR'S END

At the year’s end I come to my father’s house Where passion fruit hang gold above an open doorway And garden trees bend to the visiting bird: Here first the single vision Entered my heart, as to a dusty room Enters the pure tyrannical wind of heaven. The coal burns out; the quiet ash remains That tired minds and coarsened bodies know. Small town of corrugated iron roofs Between the low volcanic saddle And offshore reef where blue cod browse, From husks of exile, humbled, I come to your fond prison, . At an elder uncle’s deathbed I read the graph Of suffering in the face of country cousins. These have endured what men hold in common, The cross of custom, the marriage bed of knives; Their angular faces reflecting his Whose body lies stiff under the coverlet. One may walk again to the fisherman’s rock, hearing The long waves tumble, from America riding, Where mottled kelpbeds heave to a pale sun; But not again see green Aphrodite Rise to transfigure the noon. Rather the bots ceianaaee Chorus: All shall be taken, Or by the brown lagoon stand idle Where to their haunted coves the safe flocks go, And envy the paradise drake his brilliant sexual plumage. For single vision dies; spirit and flesh are sundered In the kingdom of no love. Our stunted Passions bend To serve again familiar social devils. Brief is the visiting angel. In corridors of Siiuat Our lives entwined suffer the common ill: Living and dying, breathing and begetting. Meanwhile on maimed gravestones under the towering fennel Moves the bright lizard, sunloved, basking in The moment of animal joy. James K. Boxter.