"Selections From A Diary

A long absence from those of my kind, fiction of some future age,

I narrate, elegant ingenu,
An eagle lost at sea, a shadow cast in bronze.

Bands of elders control the palace-gates
And mines are worked by foreign hands--
A scribbler in this new currency, I seek
The salute of the man crying in his solitude.

Poigs run from the hills, with rain on their backs,
To marvel at the dying of a poet. A final audience,
And his fine rhetoric thrils to he bone; already
They think toward statues in the park.

It shall be like this when the figurehead goes
From the crest of a rising vessel; how it was
When godly men walked amongthe people,
Or Christ, regally attired, was seen by peasant eyes.

(A ship lies beached upon the rocks, a drunken captain
Dreams of gold beyond his reach. A child intent upon its furious noise,
Summer confesses neither its sterility nor its images of gold.)

Yes, I too am a yeoman of sorts, as such fellows go,
And my truth shall not do for this age. Nothing less than
The thunder and dialect of the mute in speech."

Taunoa Kohere