HINE

Burning in the glow of departure
light made of loss,

Hine your gate
swings open and closes again,

On the promise of the garden,
The day of new growth.

I turned in the wind of circumstance,
made life of your dawn and dusk,

love was offered and withdrawn:
you shielded death as nothingness,

I followed in your path,
Was never to look back.

THE STREAM, A REVERY

The stream running through childhood
I knew its beginning in the hills
its cut through seasons, its end
in springy fields of marigold,
a shade and shape of another life.

Time where life crackled
through palings in the park, the rhododendron bank
fattened buds, the cricket baffles
barred the site of rain cancelled day
and the town loitered on the boundary.

I waited where the brook came out,
pearled as outfall in the pebble bank,
a wasteland's ordinary stream
asks me again to follow,
between darkness and light,
between hillside and lakeside,
a stream of first order, of continuance,
in a graceful dance through a gleaming parish,
in a revery of land and rain.

TUIS IN SPRING GARDENS

Spring search for each untwining riddle
branch or bud, enticing the scents
to open, chortle and peal,
the tui dressed post mod returns.

A laughing sun circled fool,
an acrobat, sequin costumed,
white throated performer who hangs in ease,
safe above the woven net of leaves.

Exotic and a native
amongst familiar forms,
you of slow purpose,
lucky like us.

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