Selected Verse

Waikato Times, Volume 124, Issue 20786, 22 April 1939, Page 15 (Supplement)

Selected Verse

SYMPHONY Grass is here, and the trees are here, And the sobbing wind, and a bird Crying his single note so clear That it seems a miracle, heard For the first and the swift last time; And here too is water flowing, Flashing in silver notes that climb Beyond our tenuous knowing. When we have heard the last cool note And have risen and walked away, This winter world will be remote, And we will have nothing to say. We will not know the sudden word, Who silently -wait for the bird. —Robert Wistrand THE TYPOGRAPHICAL ERROR (Another Viewpoint) Y’es, the typographic error is a slippery thing and sly; You can hunt till you get dizzy, but it somehow will get by. WTien you meet it on our pages it looks big and very bad, And we cannot greatly blame you if it sometimes makes you mad. But suppose YOU’D have to labour in the copy-reader’s place— Then, perhaps the situation might have quite another face. Why get sore and write a letter, in a bitter, ugly mood, As if all the reading matter couldn’t be of any good ? And since all our human efforts are with many errors fraught. Won’t you please forgive the sinner with a kindly, patient thought? If some typographic error once again has gotten by; Think of all the many others that don’t ever hurt your eye. If some word is badly bungled—O kind reader, won’t you, pray, Rather think of all the good things that the author has to say? —“ One of the Sinners,” in the Philadelphia Messenger.

PINE AND OAK The secret of the pine Lies in a single line, But mysteries of oak Remain as dark as smoke. The pine is just a place Where summer hibernates, Where beauty hides its face, * And where the greenness waits. But oak’s the lonely one, As distant as the sun. The oak can never be More than a tall, gaunt tree. Robert Wistrand JOY So much in this quiet room is dear to me, Gathered out of a world’s complexity; The books we chose, the colours in rug and wall, The bittersweet we gathered in the fall. Looking up from a well-loved page I mark All these; I think of the wide and fertile dark Beyond our, walls—the cities, hills and fields— Oh, lovely, inexhaustible earth, that yields Even to my clumsy touch and sight This subtle, chosen pattern of delight! —Anita Laurie Cushing. CLOCKS The pointing hands of old clocks once could tell More than the hour on the dial’s face, Each with a different accent —here a bell Tinkling its silver from a crystal case, And there a tall grandfather’s clock, whose loud Voice boomed commandingly above the rest. They were like individuals in a crowd, Each mechanism wholly self-possessed. But now time comes to us in fluent flame Controlled by distant, throbbing dynamos, And now a million rhythms are the same, For every clock upon its mantel knows An unrelenting, regimented beat. Insistent as the click of marching feet. —Helen Frith Stickney.