– Kenneth Slessor

1

I saw Time flowing like a hundred yachts

That fly behind the daylight, foxed with air;

Or piercing, like the quince-bright, bitter slats

Of sun gone thrusting under Harbour's hair.

So Time, the wave, enfolds me in its bed,

Or Time, the bony knife, it runs me through.

"Skulker, take heart," I thought my own heart said.

"The flood, the blade go by - Time flows, not you!"

Vilely, continuously, stupidly,

Time takes me, drills me, drives through bone and vein,

So water bends the seaweeds in the sea,

The tide goes over, but the weeds remain.

Time, you must cry farewell, take up the track,

And leave this lovely moment at your back!

II

Time leaves the lovely moment at his back,

Eager to quench and ripen, kiss or kill;

To-morrow begs him, breathless for his lack,

Or beauty dead entreats him to be still.

His fate pursues him; he must open doors,

Or close them, for that pale and faceless host

Without a flag, whose agony implores

Birth to be flesh, or funeral, to be ghost.

Out of all reckoning, out of dark and light,

Over the edges of dead Nows and Heres,

Blindly and softly, as a mistress might,

He keeps appointments with a million years.

I and the moment laugh, and let him go,

Leaning against his golden undertow.

III

Leaning against the golden undertow,

Backward, I saw the birds begin to climb

with bodies hailstone-clear, and shadows flow,

Fixed in a sweet meniscus, out of Time,

Out of the torrent, like the fainter land

Lensed in a bubble's ghostly camera,

The lighted beach, the sharp and china sand

Glitters and waters and peninsula -

The moment's world it was; and I was part,

Fleshless and ageless, changeless and made free.

"Fool, would you leave this country?" cried my heart,

But I was taken by the suck of sea.

The gulls go down, the body dies and rots,

And Time flows past them like a hundred yachts.