Selected Poems

And thin blotched face and mouth agape, And watery nose and vacant eye,

Just nine years old–a listless shape.

Quiet, with inefiective hands,

He used to sit at first and gaze

Across the shining mounded sands

Beyond the heaving sea, for days.

But now. He is a little king

Who holds the coast beneath his sway. Climbing Round Rock and galloping From Inch-by-Inch to Silver Spray.

Diving with joy to bring to light Some trophy from the ocean bed,

Or challenging with his frail kite

The aeroplane that roars o’erhead.

Only, at times, his lively eye

Darkens as something flits or falls Across his childish memory

Or to his childish longing calls,

And then his elders try in vain

To prise apart the treasure chest

Of his tight thought: but soon again

He smiles, and smiling seems at rest.

Where rove his earnest powers? Perchance He feels a kinship with the sun.

And wonders if drab circumstance

For him is now forever done, 

He trod in these dark reveries.