Shingle-Short and Other Verses/A Bush Section
A Bush Section.
A Bush Section.
Logs, at the door, by the fence; logs, broadcast over the paddock;
Sprawling in motionless thousands away down the green of the gully,
Logs, grey-black. And the opposite rampart of ridges
Bristles against the sky, all the tawny, tumultuous landscape
Is stuck, and prickled, and spiked with the standing black and grey splinters,
Strewn, all over its hollows and hills, with the long, prone, grey-black logs.
For along the paddock, and down the gully,
Over the multitudinous ridges,
Through valley and spur,
Fire has been!
Ay, the Fire went through and the Bush has departed,
The green Bush departed, green Clearing is not yet come.
’Tis a silent, skeleton world;
Dead, and not yet re-born,
Made, unmade, and scarcely as yet in the making;
Ruin’d, forlorn, and blank.
At the little raw farm on the edge of the desolate hillside,
Perch’d on the brink, overlooking the desolate valley,
To-night, now the milking is finish’d, and all the calves fed,
The kindling all split, and the dishes all wash’d after supper:
Thorold von Reden, the last of a long line of nobles,
Little “Thor Rayden,” the twice-orphan’d son of a drunkard,
Dependent on strangers, the taciturn, grave ten-year-old,
Stands and looks from the garden of cabbage and larkspur, looks over
The one little stump-spotted rye-patch, so gratefully green,
Out, on this desert of logs, on this dead disconsolate ocean
Of billows arrested, of currents stay’d, that never awake and flow.
Day after day,
The hills stand out on the sky,
The splinters stand on the hills,
In the paddock the logs lie prone.
The prone logs never arise,
The erect ones never grow green,
Leaves never rustle, the birds went away with the Bush,—
There is no change, nothing stirs!
And to-night there is no change;
All is mute, monotonous, stark;
In the whole wide sweep round the low little hut of the settler
No life to be seen; nothing stirs.
Yet, see! past the cow-bails,
Down, deep in the gully,
What glimmers? What silver
Streaks the grey dusk?
’Tis the River, the River! Ah, gladly Thor thinks of the River,
His playmate, his comrade,
Down there all day,
All the long day, betwixt lumber and cumber,
Sparkling and singing;
Lively glancing, adventurously speeding,
Busy and bright as a needle in knitting
Running in, running out, running over and under
The logs that bridge it, the logs that block it,
The logs that helplessly trail in its waters,
The jamm’d-up jetsam, the rooted snags.
Twigs of [1]konini, bronze leaf-boats of wineberry
Launch’d in the River, they also will run with it,
They cannot stop themselves, twisting and twirling
They too will keep running, away and away.
Yes; for on runs the River, it presses, it passes
On—by the fence, by the bails, by the landslip, away down the gully,
On, ever onward and on!
The hills remain, the logs and the gully remain,
Changeless as ever, and still;
But the River changes, the River passes.
Nothing else stirring about it,
It stirs, it is quick, ’tis alive!
“What is the River, the running River?
Where does it come from?
Where does it go?”
Listen! Listen!....
Far away, down the voiceless valley,
Thro’ league-long spaces of empty air,
A sound! as of thunder.
Look! ah, look!
Yonder, deep in the clear dark distance,
At the foot of the shaggy, snow-hooded ranges,—
Out on the houseless and homeless country
Suddenly issuing, eddying, volleying—
Smoke, bright smoke! Not the soft blue vapour
By day, in the paddock there, wreathing and wavering,
O’er the red spark well at work in the stumps:
Not the poor little misty pale pillar
Here straggling up, close at hand, from the crazy tin chimney:—
No! but an airy river of riches,
Irrepressibly billowing, volume on volume
Rolling, unrolling, tempestuously tossing,
Ah! like the glorious hair of some else-invisible Angel
Rushing splendidly forth in the darkness—
Gold! gold on the gloom!
....Floating, fleeing, flying....
Thor catches his breath....Ah, flown!
Gone! Yes, the torrent of glory,
The Voice and the Vision are gone—
For over the viaduct, out of the valley,
It is gone, the wonderful Train!
Gone, yet still going on: on: on! to the far-away township
(Ten miles off, down the track, and the mud of the metal-less roadway:
Seen, once at Christmas, and once on a fine summer Sunday:
Always a dream, with its dozens of passing people,
Its three beneficent stores)....
And past the township, and on!
—The hills and the gully remain;
One day is just like another;
In the paddock the logs lie still;
But the Train is not still; every evening it sparkles out, streams by and goes.
“What is the Train, that it travels?
Where does it come from?
Where does it go?”
It is gone. And the evening deepens.
Darker the grey air grows.
From the black of the gully, the gleam of the River is gone.
Scarcely the ridges show to the sky-line,
Now, their disconsolate fringe;
But, bright to the deepening sky,
The Stars creep silently out.
“Oh, where do you hide in the day?”
....It is stiller than ever; the wind has fallen.
The moist air brings,
To mix with the spicy breath of the young break-wind macrocarpa,
Wafts of the acrid, familiar aroma of slowly-smouldering logs.
And, hark, through the empty silence and dimness
Solemnly clear,
Comes the wistful, haunting cry of some lonely, far-away morepork,
“[2]Kia toa! Be brave!”
—Night is come.
Now the gully is hidden, the logs and the paddock all hidden.
Brightly the Stars shine out!....
The sky is a wide black paddock, without any fences,
The Stars are its shining logs;
Here, sparse and single, but yonder, as logg’d-up for burning,
Close in a cluster of light.
And the thin clouds, they are the hills,
They are the spurs of the heavens,
On whose steepnesses scatter’d, the Star-logs silently lie:
Dimm’d as it were by the distance, or maybe in mists of the mountain
Tangled—yet still they brighten, not darken, the thick-strewn slopes!
But see! these hills of the sky
They waver and move! their gullies are drifting, and driving;
Their ridges, uprooted,
Break, wander and flee, they escape! casting careless behind them
Their burdens of brightness, the Stars, that rooted remain.
—No! they do not remain. No! even they cannot be steadfast.
For the curv’d Three (that yonder
So glitter and sparkle
There, over the bails),
This morning, at dawn,
At the start of the milking,
Stood pale on the brink of yon rocky-ledged hill;
And the Cross, o’er the viaduct
Now, then was slanting,
Almost to vanishing, over the snow.
So, the Stars travel, also?
The poor earthly logs, in the wan earthly paddocks,
Never can move, they must stay;
But over the heavenly pastures, the bright, live logs of the heavens
Wander at will, looking down on our paddocks and logs, and pass on.
“O friendly and beautiful Live-Ones!
Coming to us for a little,
Then travelling and passing, while here with our logs we remain,
What are you? Where do you come from?
Who are you? Where do you go?”
Ah, little Questioner!
Son of the Burnt Bush;
Straightly pent ’twixt its logs and ridges,
To its narrow round of monotonous labours
Strictly tether’d and tied:
And here to-night, in the holiday twilight,
Conning, counting, and clasping as treasures,
Whatsoever about your unchanging existence
Moves and changes and lives:—
One delight have you miss’d, and that one of more import than any:
More quick than the River, more fraught than the Mail-Train,
More certain to move than the Stars in their courses,
The most radiant wonder, the rarest excitement of of all.
What is it? Oh, what can it be?
—It is you, little Thor! ’Tis yourself!
Little, feeble, ignorant, destitute:—
Wondering, questioning, conscious, alive!
A Mind that moves ’mid the motionless matter:
’Mid the logs, a developing Soul:
From the battle-field bones of a ruin’d epoch,
Life, the Unruin’d, freshly upspringing,
Life, Re-creator of life!
Yea, spark of Life!
Begotten, begetter, of changes:
Yea, morn of Man,
Creature design’d to create:
Offspring of elements all, appointed their captain and ruler:
Here dawning, here sent
To this, thy disconsolate kingdom—
What change, O Changer! wilt thou devise and decree?
Hail to thy god-ship, O Thor! Good luck to the Arm with the Hammer!
Good luck to that little right arm!
Green Bush to the Moa, Burnt Bush to the resolute Settler!
In strenuous years ahead,
Wilt thou wield the axe of the Fire?
Wilt thou harness the horse of the Wind?
Shall not the Sun with his strong hands serve thee, and the tender hands of the Rain?
Daytime and Night spring in turn to thy battle,
Time and Decay run in yoke to thy plough,
And Earth, from the sleep of her sorrow
Waked at thy will, with an eager delight rise, re-quicken’d, and heartily help thee?
—Till the charr’d logs vanish away;
Till the wounds of the land are whole:
Till the skeleton valleys and hills
With greenness and growing, with multiplied being and movement,
Changeful, living, rejoice!
Yea, newly-come Soul!
Here on Earth, from what region unguess’d at?
Here, to this rough and raw prospect, these back-blocks of Being, assign’d—
Lean, cumber’d with ruin, lonely, bristling with hardship,
A birthright that fires have been through—
What change, O Changer! creature, Creator, of Spirit!
In this, thy burden’d allotment, wilt thou command and create?
Finite, yet infinite,
Tool, yet Employer,
Of Forces Almighty,
Beyond thee, within,—
What Fires, of the Spirit, what Storms, wilt thou summon?
What Dews shall avail thee, what Sunbeams? What seed wilt thou sow?
Ease unto weaklings: to thews and to sinews, Achievement!
What pasture, Settler and Sovereign, shall be grazed from the soil-sweetening ashes?
What home be warm in the wild?
Nay, outflowing Heart! thou highway forward and back:
Thought-trains of the Mind! commercing with far-away worlds:
What up-country traffic and freight shall travel forth into the world?
What help will ye summon and send?
Spirit, deep in the Dark! with the light of what overhead worlds
Wilt thou in the Dark make friends?
O pioneer Soul! against Ruin here hardily pitted,
What life wilt thou make of existence?
Life! what more Life wilt thou make?
Ah, little Thor!
Here in the night, face to face
With the Burnt Bush within and without thee,
Standing, small and alone:
Bright Promise on Poverty’s threshold!
What art thou? Where hast thou come from?
How far, how far! wilt thou go?