Selected Verse

Waikato Times, Volume 118, Issue 19639, 27 July 1935, Page 13 (Supplement)

Selected Verse

IN MEMORIAM. T. E. SHAW. The Odyssey is over: here’s an end of journeying', fighting, dreaming; now at last ‘ the long-sought privacy is all his own. Silence has fallen; quiet earth receives un-resling body and thought-teeming brain, wracked sinew, taunt-strung nerve, and shattered bone. Tall grasses deck the lane down which he goes in sad procession, darkness rests those eyes once narrowed to resist the unpitying sun: hero thrushes sing . . there the swift hoopoe calls; here' lambs beside their ewes stare, half afraid ... there on hot sands Hie starveling jackals run. Oak, hawthorn, ash, old gaffers clearing ditches . . . Wide, trec-less wastes where ride hawkfeatured men . . . aeroplanes climbing—these no more to see wore Death’s worst sentence. Freed from earthly bonds the spirit soars . . . wild ravens bring their tribute and spring llowcrs bloom for him in the new Galilee. —Diana Darling. QUATRAIN. “We turn life's water into wine And bless the sacramental cups we pour; Forgiving much that we may he divine, We find wo are forgiven more." —Carl John Dostelmanu.

IN THE MEADOW Butterfly, trembling like a star Of dew upon the dewy clover, Nothing can say whfyf, things you are: Tho flower that sits beside you knows As much or little as the lover, Whose hopes, like wings, open and closeTho orders of Lhe day go on, Butterfly wing and man’s belief, Both are fragments of the sun; The same heat, the same increase, The same division, death and peace, Trembles for all upon the leaf. —Robert Gittings. THE AVIATORS. "See what a flight is here to span the cumbered world. With whirring blades the aviators come, and iron wings unfurled, from north and south and rising of the sun. And we, willi our tumultuous feet, sec gulls slar-whilc against the clouds and envy them. They have bridled Bclierophon's slecd, winged Pegasus from Helicon, followed Perseus’ feathered heels, broadcast Icarus’ antiphon. Old Leonardo’s wisdom hails triumphant substance in their sung. They will not he content with one such star, but grasp Orion’s belt, and harness the Great Boar, swoop comct-liko from Jupiter lo llery .Mars, and wear bright Venus in their diadem. —.M. Scott Johnston.