My Love Late Walking – James K. Baxter

My Love Late Walking – James K. Baxter

My love late walking in the rain’s white aisles
I break words for, through many tongues
Of night deride and the moon’s bone yard smile

Cuts to the quick of our newborn sprig of song.
See and believe, my love, the late yield
Of bright grain, the sparks of harvest wrung

From difficult joy. My heart is an open field.
There you may stray wide or stand at home
Nor dread the giant’s bone and broken shield

Or any tendril locked on a thunder stone,
Nor fear, in the forked grain, my hawk who flies
Down to your feathered sleep alone

Striding blood coloured on a wind of sighs.
Let him at the heart of your true dream move,
My love, in the lairs of hope behind your eyes.

I sing, to the rain’s harp, of light renewed,
The black tares broken, fresh the phoenix light
I lost among time’s rags and burning tombs.

My love walks long in harvest aisles tonight.


On the death of her body – James K. Baxter

It is a thought breaking the granite heart
Time has given me, that one treasure,
Your limbs, those passion-vines, that bamboo body

Should age and slacken, rot
Some day in a ghastly clay-stopped hole.
They led me to the mountains beyond pleasure

Where each is not gross body or blank soul
But a strongharpo the wind of genesis
Makes music in, such resonant music

That I was Adam, loosened byyour kiss
Form time’s hard bond, and you,
My love, in the world’s first summer stood

Plucking the flowers of the abyss.




O'Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press.