Jerusalem Sonnets (11)
One writes telling me I am her guiding light
And my poems her bible — on this cold morning
After moss I smoke one cigarette
And hear a magpie chatter in the paddock,
The image of Hatana — he bashes at the windows
In idiot spite, shouting — ‘Pakeha! You can be
‘The country’s leading poet’ — at the church I murmured, ‘Tena koe,'
To the oldest woman and she replied, ‘Tena koe’—
Yet the red book is shut from which I should learn Maori
And these daft English words meander on,
How dark a light! Hatana, you have gripped me
Again by the balls; you sift and riddle my mind
On the rack of the middle world, and from my grave at length
A muddy spring of poems will gush out.
Copyright Credit: James K. Baxter, "Jerusalem Sonnets (11)" from Selected Poems. Copyright © 2010 by The James K. Baxter Trust. Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press, Ltd.
Source: Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, Ltd., 1979)