Rob Dyer Poems

The Atlantic gale that now abrades the Côte Sauvage
stirs the savage skin as it has done since men dared raise
these broken menhirs to the god that pounds the broken cliffs
with wind and wave and the loud cry of the gulls.
...

The First Duino Elegy of Rilke
Rewritten for Roxana Dyer
...

To Canberra

On the prismed green of your grey hills,
where once when I was young only the kangaroo
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Reply to C.K. Stead, Letter to R.R. Dyer

How can we desert the day
who storm through the mists of morning?
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In dangerous silence
to the memory of
Rex Fairburn
without whom something quite different
...

I never was on Crete
they say.

Yet
...

Oruawharo Bay glistens silver in the nor-west gale,
the tourists shelter in the lea of Sugarloaf,
the stranded shags in the pohutukawa;
only the gannet in dangerous silence fishes the stormwind.
...

One day, coming down quite early in the morning to the Bay,
following the sheep track through the toetoe,
above the pied shags resting in the pohutukawa,
out to the deep cave, where the dead souls leap
...

Once in our clematis days your hooflets trampled tamariki-a-Tane:
rimu, totara, miro, ti, kahikatea, nikau,
startling the tui from the kowhai, the ruru in the kauri.
Then the settler's wife, lingering in the tin privy after tea,
...

After Sappho

Along the branches where the apples swell
a shuddering river of cold murmurs,
...