To the Lost Huia.
Where are you, dark wildling, that
once abounded
In our ferned green island?
Mute is the frail note that once resounded
From the cloistered highland
Where flickered the tantalising gleam
Of your white-tipped tail-feather,
As you dipped to drink from a dwindling stream
In throat-parching weather.
For your pied plume's gage, the brown man sought
To compass your undoing
With the sweet, cleverly-simulated note
Of your own mate's wooing.
Yet brown man was kin to bird that was pied;
And though you might fly him,
You returned on the wing ere the echoes died,
And lived to defy him.
But the white man came, and molested your wooing
With his incessant clamour—
With stroke of axe; with wresting and hewing;
And ring of hammer.
And you fled in affright, and found new terrene
Afar from intruder
But pursuing, he ravished your fastness again
With assault ever ruder.
And he smote and burned, and pillaged and scattered-Agog for plunder—
As if, under God, man were all that mattered …
Oh, pitiful blunder!
Full late we come seeking. Now we would recompense;
Guard you, and cherish.
Oh, hear us speak in the accents of penitence—
Now—lest you perish!
(No frail answer filters down the dwindled stream,
Though it's thirsty weather …
And no more flickers the teasing gleam
Of a white-tipped black feather.)

—A. J. Waldie.

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