on the end of a jack hammer, breaking up the pavement along the main street… ‘Gee there was some beaut girls went past today …’ their work dirt upon their hands and clothes, and matted in their hair. The out-of-work, getting by on few borrowed shillings, from some old acquaintance in a bar or along the street, or in a billiard room perhaps… ‘It's just as well I've got a lot of friends. You couldn't give me a couple of bob could you? A dollar will do. I'll pay you back on Wednesday. That's my pay day. I had to pay off for a suit. I'll fix you up on Wednesday boy. No kidding….’ No kidding is right. I know very well I'll never see my five bob again even while I'm giving it to him. Yet I can't very well refuse. The freezing worker … ‘When the season finishes we'll live like kings for the rest of the year. Why not? Might buy a car and tour up around Nelson and down the West Coast. We'll be right when the Works opens again… ‘ The just-arrived-in-town … ‘You were at McDonald's woolstore in Christchurch last season weren't you? … Oh I thought it was you… There was someone looked very much like you there. You haven't a brother have you? … Yes, I know, a lot of people get me mixed up too. I must have a very common face, ha! ha! …’ The man's face takes on a fallcn look and I know he's thinking … ‘Too bad I can't hit him up for a loan now. Not for McDonald's woolstore in Christchurch, down behind the railway yard's sake anyway.’ The ex-seamen, the travellers, sitting about comparing impressions of different ports, bringing with their talk the thronging market places of the Eastern cities; with all their smells and noises and movement; the teeming slums of Panama; a throbbing mob in a London pub. And yet sitting there listening, it is hard for me to imagine that these roughly dressed coarsely-spoken men have seen all this. So much more than I. For they seem very little different from me. Somehow I expect to see all this adventure written on their faces. But I still think I should have waited till some of the men I am writing about have left the boarding house, or I have left. Then this piece of writing may have an end. It's strange, but if something has no end then it seems to have no beginning, either. Or at least I think so, anyway. It is a tall square three-storied structure of part brick and part wood. And it stands just off the street amongst several other houses at the foot of a hill ….

LAMENT (He kotuku rerenga tahi) Kotuku rising white wings etch the sunrise, glissade against the dawn. Her flauting flight svelt harmony skates across the sky crest. The symmetric soaring flaunting cataracts of tumbled cloud conjures ecstacy within a soul enflamed: A watcher stark upon the marshes tenuously tethered, in spirit inexplicably united yearning embodiment in the flying to the realms beyond the dying. L. S. W. Duncan