AustLit

Epigraph: Voyez, près des Etangs ces grands roseaux mouillEs Voyez, ces oiseaux blancs et ces maisons rouillEes (Charles Trenet)

Author's note: : Charles Trenet wrote the lovely chanson 'La Mer' in the mid-1940s, from which I've quoted for my first epigraph, to be translated roughly as: 'See near the ponds / these tall watery rushes / See these white birds / and these rusted shacks'. Then in the final line of my poem I quote a familiar phrase from the English version of this song as popularised by Bobby Darin: 'Somewhere beyond the sea [she's waiting for me ... ]' There are a couple of celebrated passages quoted here from two New Zealand poets: ' ... the trick of standing upright here' is of course from Allan Curnow's sonnet 'The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch'; while the phrase 'Distance looks our way', is from Charles Brasch's poem 'The Islands'. '[Colours are] the joys and sufferings of light with shadow' is from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 'Farbenlehre'.