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Salient: Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Vol. 32, No. 11. 1969.

Three Poems

Three Poems

Between The Lines

Before going on, on a dust road Stay another hour,
—Babe, I've got to ramble ....
Before going on, through a windy town Stay: stay one more daybreak,
—You know, I've really got to ramble . . . .
But what's a day?
Just a day, please,
Only a litle while–till the chilly morning
breeze ....
—My feet start going down, going down that
highway ....
Then remember warmth, laughter,
Ploughing down shingle on a bare beach From high tide to that wet, gritty sand,
—They just start going down, and I ... I've got to go.
Yes, try to remember
Then laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh,
As that spiky grass strikes your leg,
As that fine sand whips you; fills your hair;
and flicks around your teeth—more thoroughly than I.

D. Johnson

Sonnet

Standing unmoved, peaceful and lost to time
Upon a crockery case, a brass disc
Sleeps the rooms slumber light in gentle mist
Metal yellow; O the hour slaved designs.
There etched is cryptic art in circled lines
Centripetal, where seq serpents resist.
Magic mould—only poesy can insist
The meaning as truth where beauty reclines.
What doth this lauded object offer me?
From the face close pitted like eyes black locked
I see to well my heart's inconstancy.
An artifact achieved this? I am shocked!
I have been fed a soul hidden message:
Purity is guilt's gained heritage.

Stephen Oliver

Insomnia

The mind, awake to the chill of a night and a world stirs and loses hope of sleep. Disturbance ceases, but in the quiet I have a question
My head throbs, pulsates, faster, faster, faster, and faster until
my eyes fall back and I stare
at the midnight shawow of a tree on a wall, swaying, dipping, rising, just rocking.
My mind races one, teeming with the happenings the security, the words.
I tighten my eyes, awaiting sleep.
Pictures, strange and coloured, whirl by.
There is a pattern in a coiled tube with spinning S shapes,
a long thread around the black shadow of a man.
Light wakens the pattern and it becomes a bud; Opening, growing,
living then dying, like us, but green.
The first bud is nipped early. The second is left to become old and infertile.
Then comes the searching, the tossing, the burning and deep inside
I scream "Why are we so like buds?"
But no-one answers.
No-one really knows.

Judith Holmes