SISTERS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 128, 26 November 1938, Page 20

SISTERS

(Original.) Twas early in the springtime, the flowers were bright and fair^ There were showers and mingled sunshine and freshness in the air, The gentle stream was singing to the banks of fern and flowers, Wfcile the tuis sang a chorus from their scattered rimu bowers. There stood two giants of woodland in the centre of the plain, The daffodils of liquid gold grew round their feet again, The mighty oak, a tower of strength, the queen of England's wood, While at her side the rimu, her Maori sister, stood. And in the arms of mother oak a sparrow small and brown, Had built a dainty, little nest of straw and thistledown, But in the rimu's drooping bows a fantail, pert and gay, Built up a basket soft with moss and wisps of grass and hay. When twilight 'neath her starry veil crept softly o'er the plain And dropped her mists of mystery where busy day had lain, When all the land was softly still and silence reigned supreme, When the tuis sang sweet lullabys-'and scattered seeds of dream. 'Twas then the English fairies beneath their native oak. Their small heads clad in acorns, a wondrous, magic folk, The goblin pipers played for them, the rabbits held the lights, And they danced their dance of springtime, these dainty English sprites. But underneath the rimu, like some forgotten strain Of music, came the fairies of MaoriJand again, \ . So. pale of face, so fair of form beneath the stars they stood, These children of the fern-banked streams, these natives of the wood. And when the dawn came gliding in the rimu and the oak Linked arms amid the brightening light, and as the world awoke They heard a happy father sing good-morning to all men* For, newly-hatched within the oak, he'd chicks that numbered ten. NANCY HANRON (14).

Nelson.