And many have passed from my sight, whither I never shall know,
Swept away in the rushing river or caught in the mountain snow;
All the old hands are gone who came with me over the sea,
But the land that we made our own is the same bright land to me.
There are dreams in the gold of the kowhai, and when ratas are breaking
in bloom
I can hear the rich murmur of voices in the deeps of the fern-shadowed gloom.
Old memory may bring me her treasures from the land of the blossoms of May,
But to me the hill daisies are dearer and the gorse on the river bed grey;
While the mists on the high hilltops curling, the dawn-haunted
haze of the sea,
To my fancy are bridal veils lifting from the face of the land of the free.
The speargrass and cabbage trees yonder, the honey-belled flax in its bloom,
The dark of the bush on the sidings, the snow-crested mountains that loom
Golden and grey in the sunlight, far up in the cloud-fringed blue,
Are the threads with old memory weaving and the line of my life
running through;
And the wind of the morning calling has ever a song for me
Of hope for the land of the dawning in the golden years to be.
Christopher John Brennan.
Romance
Of old, on her terrace at evening …not here…in some long-gone kingdom O, folded close to her breast!…
—our gaze dwelt wide on the blackness (was it trees? or a shadowy passion the pain of an old-world longing that it sobb'd, that it swell'd, that it shrank?) —the gloom of the forest blurr'd soft on the skirt of the night-skies that shut in our lonely world.
…not here…in some long-gone world…
close-lock'd in that passionate arm-clasp no word did we utter, we stirr'd not: the silence of Death, or of Love… only, round and over us that tearless infinite yearning and the Night with her spread wings rustling folding us with the stars.
…not here…in some long-gone kingdom of old, on her terrace at evening O, folded close to her heart!…