CHALK WHITE AMONG THE SPLINTERED SHELLS

Te Ao Hou, September 1963, Page 15

CHALK WHITE AMONG THE SPLINTERED SHELLS Bare, like the deer forests in the hills, The logs shiver in the river's flow And here a small boy cries his joy Amidst the water-smooth rocks and stones That frame Rakaia's slow scuttle to the sea. Lost lamb bleating on the Plain And small boy crying his joy Kicking at the cluster of moa-bones And fragments of the moa-hunter's thigh Chalk-white among the splintered shells Of ancient middens, hidden In the river's burndened soil. Over the bones of the dead And the shells that ring of the sea, A kotuku lies, wounded in the wing. That night the small boy dreams On a bed of feather boulders, Of chiselled thighs and swivelled shells And a moa bleating on the Plains. And still in dreams The lost lamb sleeps While the kotuku files south To the rain forests of Okarito.