The Moving Finger

Forest and Bird, Issue 197, 1 August 1975, Page 1

The Moving Finger

I MUST confess to having been, since my early days, a devotee of Omar Khayyam, translated by Fitzgerald, and those who were at the annual meeting may remember that I quoted one verse of his in reference to those members who had gone during the past year. That verse began “For some we loved, the loveliest and the best”.

Musing on what I should write for this editorial, I thought of another better-known verse:

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

Indeed the Moving Finger writes and moves on. That finger is variously defined in this modern material world as progress, or increased gross national product, or higher standard of living. But is it? Is there one leader in the commercial world in this country —just one —who does not hold in his memory one treasured bush-clad cove, one distant blue-hazed peak, one clear rippling stream overhung by kowhai or rimu, one verdant river flat, which forever beckons him back?

It is a fact that most of those commercial leaders now own just such a retreat, to which, as opportunity occurs, they retire again and again.

—J. V. Jerram,

Let our Society remind these commercial leaders that our distinctive environment, once destroyed, cannot be “lured back by piety or wit”; nor all their children’s tears wash out that which their moving finger has written on our beloved land—the crooked finger in the shape of the polluted river, the high-pitched whine of the chain saw, and the roar of the bellowing bulldozer.

President.