THE FERRY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 884, 13 July 1956, Page 24

THE FERRY

(CROSSING in the Ferry, if you sit facing away from the open sea and hear the crackle of burning, do not fear; it is only yacht-sails, their calico-white consuming in the sun’s eye Or if, facing the full Pacific, you are deceived by smoke scribbled along the horizon, it is only peninsulas and islands, no command spectacular to set fire to the summer-time. Crossing in the Ferry, now read your paper matin, arrange your halo of headline-Believed Dead. Cold War, Pacific Test for the Bomb. (Later your dampened gospel floats in the harbour and the fish will not swallow it; even the five thousand little fish waiting to grow and be caught and fed to the multitudes, are not hungry for headline.) Crossing in the Ferry, even the children have chocolate botnbs. Warring against the sun, the summer, the yachts warming at the blue hearth, you too carry in your hand or throat or heart your cherished confection of ice. What if it grow? Why, then, will you lie down on your chocolate spread, as on a slab of tomb or a death-bed, in sleep that chills your memory and frosts your living will? Crossing in the Ferry, the Captain knows it is so. Between burning yacht an? smoke of Coromandel he steers the vessel. The Captain, Charon, voyager of Styx, familiar with depths of Phlegethon, Acheron; he knows it is so; while in the summer heat your body glistens salt, drained out by rival darker harbours of blood one day wrung dry without warning, and you know it is so. What bomb

spectacular will freeze or fire the surmmer-time?

J.

F.