Select Poetry.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 177, 21 November 1874, Page 3

Select Poetry.

LOVE-STORIES. Can I tell any ? No : I have forgotten all I ever knew. lam too old. I saw the fairies go For ever from the moonshine and the dew Before I met with you. “ Rose’s grandmother knows Love-stories ?” She could tell you one or two . “ She is no; young?" You wish that you were Rose.' “ She hecrs love-stcries ? Are they ever true . Sometime I may ask you. I was not living when Columbus came here, nor before that ? So You wonder when I saw the fairies, then ? The Indians would have killed them all, you know. “ How lon'j is long ago ?” And if I am too old To know love-stories, why am I not good ? Why don’t I read the Bible, and not scold ? Why don’t I pray, as all old ladies should ? (I only wish I could.) Why don't I buy gray hair ? And why— . . , , Oh ! child, the Sphinx herself might spring Out of her sands to answer, should you dare Her patience with your endless questioning. “Does she know anything (" Perhaps. “ Then, could she tell Love-stories ?’’ If her lips were not all stone ; For there is one she must remember well— One whose great glitter showed a fiery zone Brightness beyond its own. One whose long music aches — How sharp the sword, how sweet the snake, O Queen ! -- Into the last unquiet heart that breaks. But the Nile-lily rises faint between— You wonder what I mean ? I mean there is but one Love-story in this withered world, forsooth ; And it is brief, and ends, where it begun (What if I tell, in play, the dreary truth ?) With something wo call Youth. SONG OF A NATIVE FEMALE. [From Maori Mementoes, presented to Sir George Grey by the Native people.] Who in a paroxysm of love, it is said, threw herself headlong from a high cliff upon which she sat and sang this her Funeral Dirge : Thou glowing sun, that sinkest in the horizon, Oh ! linger for a while to light my exit hence ! ’Twere well to be afflicted by the gods With some dread malady to hasten death ; To hasten my departure from the world. I feel my anger rise against a busy Multitude, for all the secrets of my breast The tongue, the evil tongue, proclaims. And am I of more note than Parilii, Whoso fame lias reached us from the Southern lands ? They say that Tahetalie, too, is beautiful: But far above them all is heard The fame of youthful Pokai, who, like The burning sulphur, mounts aloft, Defying every effort to suppress it, While the renowned Moetara, in the South, Looks on and listens. And now my Doom is fixed ; my sight grows dim ; And lo !—I sink—l die !