New Zealand Verse/The Whare

by Henry Lea Twisleton

XLI.

The Whare.

It stands upon the grassy slope,
 A ruin, brown and lone:
The door swings on its hinge of rope
 With strange and dismal tone,
Whene’er the wandering winds that pass
Bear with them, o’er the thistled grass,
 The darksome forest’s moan.

Lone seems it when on all around
 The summer moon lies still;
When not a zephyr stirs to sound
 The rata on the hill:
When but the locust on the tree
Adds to the murmur of the bee
 Its tuneless note and shrill.

Here, mouldering walls stand rent and dark,
 Once wind-and-weather proof;
There, strips of brown manuka-bark
 Drop from the tattered roof;
And wandering cattle, wild as wind,
Upon the sward have left behind
 The print of many a hoof.

No more, when with its burden black
 Low broods the winter night,
Shall shine through every chimney-crack
 The back-log’s yellow light.
The bushman’s tiring task is done;
And stumps, that rot in rain and sun,
 Stand bleached to spectral white.

Lone whare, on the green hill-side,
 From human haunts apart,
Unnoticed by the eye of Pride,
 A hallowed spot thou art.
This roof, that ever inward falls,
This shattered door, these mouldering walls,
 Once held a human heart.

H. L. Twisleton.