Rites of Passage

It may or may not be raining –
A fine, light drizzle afloat
On the air that dampens your face
And your hands – or a steady heavy fall
On the roof, flooding the gutters,
Swirling from downpipes into the drains –
Either way, it is perfectly quiet.
The neighboring townhouses have moved
To settle far beyond hedgerows
And fields – their scattered rooftops
Here and there showing amid
The full-leaved canopies of trees –
They too rest in the silence
That gathers round with distance.
See how tall the grass stands, high
On the smooth-mown lawn, the seed-heads
On their stalks in their hundreds
Wave above the sills, brushing
The glass of the windows, and
The garden as harmonious as was planned,
Growing freely whatever it will.
We two on top of the hill look down
On the breaking ocean waves at once
With the dusty, sun-dried plains,
The green, motionless farms, and
You, with a young woman’s full hair –
Me, a child playing at the lake edge –
Are become one, are now and departed.
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Harold Jones is a New Zealander, educated at Cambridge University, where he was awarded an Exhibition to read English. His poetry has been widely published in UK and NZ literary journals. He has been a prize-winner in national UK and NZ poetry competitions, and, as a lyricist, in the UK Songwriting Contest, the largest such event in the world. A selection of his work in AUP New Poets Four (Auckland University Press, 2011), drew the UK review, “this excellent poet, a kind of Ted Hughes crossed with Bukowski,” with a further selection, Curriculum Vitae (Xlibris, 2014), reviewed in NZ as “downright incredible.” His work has won the acclaim of pre-eminent critics and poets: among them, Al Alvarez, “I like the elegance and control, the drive to say something rather than just to cut a fashionable figure," and Ted Hughes, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.” In the US his poems appear in Merion West and VoegelinView.

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