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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 9 (January 1, 1934)

To the Maori Language

To the Maori Language.

O proud, majestic language! You enshrine within your words
The green quietness of forests and the honeyed songs of birds.
Rolling down from the Cloud-piercers, wrapped in darkness, there first came
The grave measure of your thunder, sonorous yet keen as flame.
Tumbling through you like the bubbling of bright springs the voices flow
Of the ever-singing waters clear and cold and pure as snow,
Moving deeply in the music that, as wind moves in a tree,
Swells your rhythm with the long and lonely echo of the sea
Till all sounds of earth and water through your substance flash and gleam,
As a lake reflects the movement of the reeds that round it dream.
Even as a kauri, kingly in the grandeur of its might,
Is nourished in the darkness that its strength may pierce the light,
So your poetry, deep-rooted in the richness of the earth,
Beats and pulses with the Nature that first gave it vibrant birth,
And her colour burns within you like a rata bough flung high,
In a rushing cloud of crimson, up against the windy sky.
Elemental and eternal as her spirit, may you be
Rooted through the complex ages in a strong simplicity …
Like a kauri, like a Piercer of the Clouds whose sky-steeped snow
Lies remote above the changes that the changing years know,
May you tower above the turmoil of the centuries fretting by,
Giving back the rolling voices of the earth and sea and sky
In the grandeur of a measure beating out your ancient place,
O proud, majestic language, as the guardian of a race.

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