1951–61
Ian Lamont
Earth, you are frozen now,
The dead-cold centre of a doom-darkened winter.
Yet from this spiny row
Of waxen, wasted willow-sticks must grow
New life in spring.
The sun will be warmer then
And velvet leaves will spin
A net of new-born comfort round old signs.
Persistent sapling shoots in lines
Of contradicting green
Will not admit
That dead-brown death has even been.
1951. Previously unpublished
The sparrows understand but do they fear?
Does the threat of what’s to come grip them within
And freeze the last warm pleasure in Autumn’s sin
Or are they careless that the cold is near?
The mood descends upon my willing mind.
On the rock wall, ivy is dying;
On the green lawn, yellow leaves lying
Can scarcely stir themselves to greet the wind.
Rocks laid bare beneath the barren stalk
Call scenes of time and darkness to the eye.
The lily, a golden brown, has decided to die;
Soon rain will be the garden’s whispered talk.
I know that spring will come at winter’s death,
I know the sun will rise and set the same,
But on my winter page is scored a name
And how will that change, though summer soon draws breath?
Kiwi, 1952
Remembering the General Store, post-office above
And matchbox church below, the bridged stream
Speaking the moon’s mood in supercilious whispers
Or the sun’s incandescence when cicadas click,
I salute Obsession’s sister, Memory.
In this image returning to mind the wind whispers
To pine belts, whistles in the wires of time above,
Or plays with smoke where cattle-trains clatter and click
On the track, and passengers, each carrying a memory
Turn blank walls of their eyes to the blink of the stream.
Here once my hands cupped water from the stream
And today seems fresher for that cool memorial.
The roads in brief embrace of dust, above
The field where a long-distant past echoes
Among stumps in the remembered hollow-voiced chock
Of the axe, are the cross of more recent memory
The great uncle spoke of, though his teeth clicked
In his head, and his words were a hesitant stream
In a youthful land, under storm-clouds of war above.
How much of that scene has changed? Wordless, it whispers
As if preserved from time and the machine’s clack
It is to remain for ever, hearing grasses whisper
And milk-cans clatter, so that all memory
In each generation shall include the symbol stream,
Bush on distant hills, and the hawk hovering above.
Published under the title ‘Settlement’ in the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, 1953, and A Book of New Zealand, ed. J. C. Reid, 1964
Perhaps you hoped to lose an old despair,
A discontent, or earn the praise that lies
In a cause the headline news-page glorifies;
Or seeking money and a change of scene, you saw
Reason there, and armed against chaos to share
The ‘heavy burden’. Knowing what death denies
You may have steeled yourself in colloquies
Of liberal thought – small comfort when the heart’s laid bare.
Fed on the manufactured truth, you stilled
An older boredom in the gamble of guns and shells
And paid the debt calmly when your loss was billed.
Your epitaph is the age-old cry that tells
How you died ‘fighting for peace’ – words fogged in sighs.
In the arms of our hate you were strangled by a knot of lies.
Jindyworobak Anthology, 1953, and Craccum Literary Supplement, 1953
Frost on the angle-iron of roofs
And sun sliding diagonals of light
Into my room. From the window
Maybe you watched the migrant birds
Like night-hopes, gathering to leave.
Did you decide then not to disturb
The morning of my dream, leaving
Me deep asleep, hearing
Only the discord of waves
Rising with a wind from the sea?
Craccum Literary Supplement, 1953
All day the shouts, cracking of leather whip
Over bullock team, and the tree’s loud groan:
Until, down what remained of the old slip
Through bush to ruined mill, the kauri was won
Free of its home. And when we had stripped the log
Clean of its limbs, and only the drag
To the road remained, there was time for rest,
A bottle or two, with talk of bush-bound days
When whine of pit-saw carried over the crest
Of hills tied tight in green, and falling trees
Split with the cracking of whips. Not now those teams
Creeping like a disease along the seams
Of the mountain range. Still on these higher slopes
The bush grows thick, where wild boar dives
For cover under fern and supple-jack ropes.
And there the oldest hand, lean, with the sly
Humour of his age invited us back
In time, his gang, without home but a brown shack
By rushing water, and no town worth the name
Within a hundred miles. We could not play
For long our part in that past: it was a game
Of make-believe from which we turned away
To finished roads, glad now to see the town,
The shops, the stop-banks, sprouting where trees had grown.
New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, 1955, and Verse For You, book 3, ed. J. G. Brown, 1958
You are the music of another time
Strung on the frame of now and harping long
Over the quickstep shapes and shaky mime
The age strikes poses in. Beauty among
The crones and crooners of despair, your eyes
Beg each a pardon though your face is proud.
Knowing the willing ear is also wise
Yours is the voice of truth that dares aloud.
And this, the music which we will not face,
Accuses us who’ll bray sooner than bat
One eyelid praise before such sounds of grace.
Sing, then, your endless swansong to our flat
Accompaniment. Time banks these notes of truth.
Unrecognised, you are our vanished youth.
New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, 1955, and Kiwi, 1955
Under the clean sky at evening, beyond gum trees and the
cut smell of grass,
I take the clay track to look for friends, and praise of
friends, and pass
Propped by a trunk, untempted by airs that tempt me, the
hut of a man
Whose name I do not know. His lamp is lit, scattering
on books that run
Shelf-wise along a wall, erratic light that holds the
hut contained,
He shadowed by it, not looking out, having
retained
Against the drum-beat of the sea, against the voices that
float above it and call,
Against the garrulous, egotistical gull of the heart, a
roof and a wall.
Unknowing, he sits in judgement on me, whom I have
never met,
And draws, lovingly, deliberately, the casual consolation of
a cigarette.
1950s. Previously unpublished
Each day is wedded to what might have been,
The ghost that takes the other offered hand
Born in impossible duality.
Each hour lies bedded in a present dream
Where two roads offer one unutterable end
Through fate or time’s duplicity.
Words light our shadows on a vital screen,
The different means that parallels the end
Present, but past all possibility.
Death lives in living, laughs at the dying wish
That once attained puts on imperfect flesh.
Numbers, June 1955
‘This will abate. Then will come the time
When artifice is lauded like the birds,
Age mould its passions into carefree rhyme,
Priestship in poetry, monument in words.
‘Now is the time to dream that golden day:
Labour that sings, youth in dancing pairs,
Love mending all uncoloured, bookish ways,
Sunlight in markets on the heaped-up wares.
‘These and the grace of hands that through each sense,
Translating dream to object, myth to song,
Grant to the ear their music, eye their dance.’
‘And still the poet dream? Against what wrong?’
Meanjin, Spring 1955
She wore the novice habit, a dull grey,
Waited nine months on her incubating soul
(The righteous hatch to open), assumed the role
Of penitent for crimes. Enormously
Self-pity’s belly grew, as is its way.
Big Bible words banged down inside her head –
The thrust and charge of lust condemned, the bed
A place of prayer, fearing the dirt of day.
Yet sleep had human hands to lift the curse,
Led her through fields and over rustic stiles,
Uncorked the bottle, opened the book of verse
And showed how love was made beside the streams.
‘Sister,’ the holy Mother cried, ‘you smile!’
‘God,’ she replied, ‘is good to me in dreams.’
Arena, 43, 1956
I walk Muriwai beach
West of Auckland, and think
Its black, light-speckled reach
Of sand a proper place,
Where no one goes to sink
His wordy poet’s face
But stalks his shadow where the seabirds cry.
I might have made my mark
With those self-righteous men –
Pitched voices in the dark
Who light the Coming Age;
Might have obeyed the ten
Commandments of their rage,
But stalk my shadow where the seabirds cry.
And then I’ve tried the part
Of sad-eyed clownish lover,
Backing the clownish heart’s
Hunch, and never winning;
It’s time all that was over,
Time for a new beginning:
I stalk my shadow where the seabirds cry.
Sydney Bulletin, 12 December 1956
Lord Gannet glides along his arc of air,
White-into-yellow neck, and eye to spear
The sea for fish; swooping, makes eating look
An art he’s learned out of some ancient book –
This aristocrat, measuring the bay.
See where he brings precision, and the way
Each glide is broken by a plummet plunge,
The shimmering downward foil a fencer’s lunge.
Few fish, or small, his lordship takes, the sport
Being one armorial ancestry has taught,
And food (at least to every delicate eye)
A matter less of weight than artistry.
Old Mrs Shag squats heavy on a rock
Watching for bargains. Water takes the shock
Her flopping forward makes, and ripples clear
Round where black back and tail now disappear;
Then yards away is broken by the stretch
Of struggling bill, gulping down the catch.
New Zealand Listener, January 1956, and New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, 1956–57
Already forgotten the men and women whose journey
Half round the world to find a pair of islands
Set my life here; neglected their names, whose hands
Pointed to mountains stepping from the sea,
Who rowed ashore with pigs, fat sacks of grain,
Sharp implements to beat a stubborn ground
They could not own, hearing always the sound
Of chipping surf that shared their own frustration.
Forgotten but not lost, who nourish soil
In rainy Kamo under their crumbling stones,
First layer of whatever our blind toil
Shapes without plan. To them may words atone
For what seemed failure, and for small success,
Among these hills they tore in their distress.
outside the thin rain falls
on steaming leaves
the curved and buttressed walls
dry under eaves
down urn-flanked steps she runs
among the trees
mist and the fragrance stun
her velleities
and still the notes repeat
from the hot room
ravel’s boléro beats
on the afternoon
mad she whispers mad
her satin stained
shoes crushing fruit gone bad
in the summer rain
delicate fingers play
across her mind
the steps are ivory keys
not left behind
and still his casual grace
inflicting pain
tears and her ruined face
and the drifting rain.
New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, 1956–57
I have led my five senses like hungry children
Into the world of poems, and there fed them.
I have shot my spirit like an arrow into the heavens,
For it knows no satisfaction in the life of things.
I have plunged my mind into the clear well of science
Like a dry sponge, hungering to cool my brow.
Yet I know no power great as Necessity.
Necessity, goddess, you who stand alone
We offer nothing at altar or graven stone;
Knowing you deaf to prayer and sacrifice,
Moved neither by pity, nor a price;
Yet pray that you, whom even Zeus needs,
Press not too heavily on our frailest deeds,
For we know no power great as Necessity.
We see the hands of Admetus bound on rods of her will;
We see his tears that water a barren hill.
We listen for a last departing breath
Signing the marriage of Necessity and Death.
We hear the praise of a thousand years of men
And in their words Alcestis live again.
Though we know no power great as Necessity,
Goodness like a fountain for ever spills
To loose your name, Alcestis, among the hills.
From a version of Euripides’ Alcestis written with Iain Lonie. See notes, p. 521.
High on the afternoon a violin
Its note now sure, now broken by gusts of wind,
Runs to the ear or falls short in the yard –
Music uncertain of the path it takes.
As once a drone out of a baritone throat
Came reaching down to me on a hot morning
Under the cabbage tree – a swarm of wasps
Backing and filling round their industry.
Some bird notes, too, at night touch and are gone,
Startle on rough roads or across fields,
Leaving the homeward traveller seeming to hear
Danger disguised as a silence.
Murmurs hidden deep in busy streets,
Mutters in empty rooms, the fear and desire
For what it is suggests itself and is gone –
Deep in a day of dreams, a violin.
Meanjin, Winter 1957
Bristol buzzes. Autumn chills the skies.
The night is shot through with a dog that flies
A thousand miles up, yelping data down.
Our earth has shed her first real tear and cries
To lose a little dust she called her own.
Today a plane crashed at the edge of town.
Now midnight murmurs as the fires burn down
Where fifteen souls, hot rockets from the blaze,
Shot their way out into the large Unknown.
Like arrows after them go prayers and praise.
Flags are run up on emptiness, and Earth
Labouring always to bring shapes to birth,
Acquisitive of scrap, and hating most
All that flies free of her compelling girth,
Hunches in frost beneath our newest boast.
I cannot see the thing I am
But touch its edges as I can
Watching with imperfect sight
Its shadow in a solemn light.
I cannot know the thing you are.
Lips, movements, eyes, familiar
(Each you) in separation call.
No man’s at one time true to all.
The thing you see, the thing I see –
Neither is really you or me,
But each as apprehended through
The differences of me and you.
Yet let me praise you, formed to please,
Who breed such ambiguities.
‘If I should die think only this of me,
That there’s some corner of a foreign field …’
– Rupert Brooke
Up to my ears lounging
In English grass that evening
I might have been a Georgian
Trying to reconcile
One silent, ripening field
With what I knew of the world.
I could do no better than they
At the end of England’s day
Thinking about myself
And good beer, and clean sheets,
Watching that predator
The tawny owl drift over.
Light thickened as Macbeth
The witch of Wooky Hole
Was stabbed and turned to stone.
Everything had that look.
It had happened in a book
Nothing moved in the lane.
Down there an only train
Had stuttered through
The hole in England’s heart.
Alien, too clever by half
Would never be clever enough.
Up to my ears lying
In a foreign field not dying
It might have been myself
Happy to be where I was
At the end of England’s day,
Not wanting to go – or to stay.
Autumn breaks along the blood,
Down the ditches leaves are flowing,
She who teaches solitude
Shakes her red-brown hair and goes
Singing down a blade of wind.
Touch red hair that tumbles free,
Touch the freckled face of water;
Grant the brief ascendancy
Of the voice that echoes after
All the love that loss accords.
You beside him in this wood
Make the song he makes your own,
That it may be understood
Yours the tousled head of autumn
Floating from him like a leaf.
Holding it high the priest in starched parchment presents
Christ with a silver cup for the best sportsman of the year.
The effigy looks down and cannot accept it. He supports
the east wall. Subdued by the impeccable, the indulgent,
I pad out pursued by an anthem. Grass is green; graves
have gravitas; the thatched pub, its beams and its brass,
are open to the sun. A branch line has burst into leaf.
Nothing is exactly vertical or horizontal, nothing un-
pardonable. A Sunday news-board announces a new tax
on cigarettes. Is this new? Undeterred, I light one. In
ancient Rome one might have known how to conduct oneself.
Where is the world? Where are the keys to my car?
There was a girl went thinking in a gale –
It was her way – or on a train, not seeing
The flying trees and whiteness of white birds
In a turned field. Like Carrington perhaps
In the Gertler portrait, she remained in the mind.
Daily she put them down, her thoughts like things
Or trackside flowers through which the trains went racing
To an end that might be bunting or the stocks.
Did she paint her nails because her name was Never?
I met her once, wearing a page of Shakespeare,
Placing cherries in the snow, moving with grace
Through a dream of squirrels in a bookish wood.
The marchioness weeps in her brutal mirror –
Youth has cast its eyes another way.
In spite of age, the baron’s ribald error
Has called the lovely maiden into play
Who weeps to learn the world so rich in wrong.
A mocking pity smiles upon their song.
This sequence is previously unpublished. Dates are uncertain, except that the first is 1957 when the dog Laica was sent into space in a Russian rocket. And I have confirmed that a Britannia crashed on the edge of Bristol in November 1957.
Willemstad’s Dutch façades teach colours to meet and debate.
A black waiter brings ice-cream on a yellow plate.
The Caribbean breaks low on the old fort wall.
In there Ethel and the Doctor are swimming in a glass pool.
The road-bridge swings aside, lets pass another ship.
The waiter returns across the marble, helps me decide on a tip.
He and the mop-girl are at home. I am nowhere at all.
The blue sea breaks and breaks, white on the orange wall.
I lack a language. Colours all speak of the weather.
Goggled at, Ethel and the Doctor swim coolly together.
A lizard translates itself from a shadowy groove
To a sunlit patch of marble, and is not seen to move.
Somewhere deep under the reef I think an angel fish
Pauses in bright shafts, hangs weightless, without a wish.
Previously unpublished. Date probably late 1959
On the floor our fire
In white skin alight
Barely visible may be
To him on the street
If he should strain to see
Us, getting it right.
Never mind if he stare –
We have our licence,
And what he half-sees
He half-creates –
The undefeated Pair
Doomed to pass through the gates
And meet him there.
Previously unpublished. Date probably 1961
To be sung to the tune of ‘God defend New Zealand’. Written April 1960 for the departure of an all-white All Black team for a tour of South Africa, captained by Wilson Whineray and managed by Tom Pearce.
Boss of men in football socks
Keep backs white, and golden, locks;
White and woolly as our flocks
Pearce, defend Apartheid!
Kaffir, Coloured, keep inside
While we watch the scrum’s blind side –
Nothing nigger, nothing pied:
Pearce defend Apartheid!
All-white All Blacks rally here,
Meet Erasmus’ searching stare,
Show your finger nails and hair –
Pearce, defend Apartheid!
Welcome Whineray and all,
Keep your blue eyes on the ball,
Plug your ears if Kaffirs call:
We defend Apartheid!
Previously unpublished
Suburb or Sabine farm, no human talents
Create, though they regulate as best they can,
Your order that answers, in feather, fin and flower,
Motions of our two first orbs. See where tides
Advancing under the causeway flush the Bay.
Light silvers the ferns, domestic grass pricks up
To meet the mower’s onslaught, and my timber house
Creaks on its jacks. That once I crossed
The rust-red river, heard steel speak and saw
Scavengers wait on the dying; that I command
At peace diagrams of dissolving stars
Or proceed, white-coated, against the militant Crab –
Such purpose itself commends. But my blood must keep
Even as Caesar’s, your lyric measure precisely,
Or lose itself among the abstract spaces
Where no bird builds, no predator patrols
The grainy shallows,
Nor sap rises to inform a tree.
Previously unpublished, apart from a fragment of it which appeared, some time after it was written, in Crossing the Bar. It was intended for the opening of a collection of poems.