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Salient. Victoria University Students' Newspaper. Volume 39, Issue 10. 24 May 1976

Poetry

page 16

Poetry

The Sheep Child

Farm boys wild to couple.
With anything - with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earth - mounds
Of pinestraw, will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own
In the hay-tunnel dark
And dung of barns, they will
Say "I have heard" tell

That in a museum in Dargaville
Way back in a comer somewhere
There's this thing thats only half
Sheep - like a woolly baby -
Pickled in alcohol - because
Those things can't live - his eyes
Are open - but you can't stand to look
I heard from somebody who...."
But this is how almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The sheep are safe in the west hill
Pasture - but we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?

Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may
Be saying - saying
I am here, in my fathers house.
I who am half of your world, came deeply
To my mother in the long grass
Of the west pasture, where she stood
like moonlight
Listening for foxes. It was something
like love
From another world that seized her
From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head
Out of dew, without every looking, her best
Self to that great need. Turned loose,
She dipped her face.
Further into the chill of the earth, and
in a sound
Of sobbing - of something stumbling
Away, began, as she must do,
To carry me. I woke, dying,

In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes
Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment
The great grassy world from both sides,
Man and beast in the round of their need,
And the hill wind stirred in my wool,
My hoof and my hand clasped each other,
I ate my one meal
Of milk and died
Staring. From the dark grass I came
straight
To my father's house, whose dust
Whirls up in the halls for no reason
When no one comes - piling deep in
A hellish mild corner,
And, through my immortal waters,
I meet the sun's grains eye
To eye, and they fail at my closet
of glass.
Dead, I am most surely living
In the minds of farm boys: I am
he who drives
Them like wolves from the hound
bitch and calf
And from the chaste ewe in the wind.
They go into woods - into bean
fields - they go Deep into their known right hands.
Dreaming of me,
They groan - they wait - they suffer
Themselves, they marry, they raise their
kind.

made

3800 odd button-holes
16 cars
4364 cans peas
78 school desks
4 graves
spare parts of phoenix
poetic justice
only ever got
one day out of
assembly lines

- Eric Beach

Victoria Book Centre. 15 Mount St. Petone

Poem

You're sick, old man
Sick and lonely
And it hurts me to see
that no-one car,
After a whole life-time
still no one cares
And I too would like to care,
Old Man.
But I just haven't got the time.

- Ben Smith

Soldier with kit holding a drum

Two Birds: A Dialogue

The roc wings fanwise
Soaring ninety thousand li
And rousing a raging cyclone.
The blue sky on his back, he looks down
To survey man's world with its towns and cities
Gunfire licks the heavens,
Shells pit the earth.
A sparrow in his bush is scared stiff.
"This is one hell of a mess!
O, I want to flit and fly away."

"Where, may I ask?"
The sparrow replies,
"To a jewelled palace in elfland's hills.
Don't you know a triple pact was signed
Under the bright autumn moon two years ago?
There'll be plenty to eat,
Potatoes piping hot
With beef thrown in."
"Stop you windy nonsense!
Look you, the world is being turned upside down"