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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 11
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along with the ruined house or at least its firestones, nothing, not even the twisted trees, remains to mark where the orchard and farmhouse had been on the farm on Creamery Road, below Saddle Hill, where Baxter's father Archibald had grown up. A visit to the site with his father shows only an empty paddock, 'not a stone of the house standing', although it all remains there in his father's memories. But for the poet it is another image of loss: 'I inhabit the empty ground'. Another visit, this time alone, to the Kuri bush farm where his 'first years flung by / (Earth's) folly unseen yet', shows that only a mound stands where the farmhouse was. But he carries memories of his mother lighting the kerosene lamp and his father taking him outside at night Holding me up to look at The gigantic rotating wheel of the stars Whose time isn't ours.. |
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