New Zealand Verse/Rona

LXXVII.

Rona.

Rona, Rona, sister olden,—
Rona in the moon!
You’ll never break your prison golden.
Never, late or soon!

Rona, for her crying daughter,
At the dead of night
Took the gourd and went for water,—
Went without a light.

There she heard the owlets wrangle
With an angry hoot:
Stick and stone and thorny tangle
Wounded Rona’s foot.

“Boil the moon!” she said in passion
“Boil your lazy head!
Hiding thus in idle fashion
In your starry bed!”

Angry was the moon in heaven;
Down to earth she came:—
“Stay you ever unforgiven
For the word of shame!

Up!—You made the moon a byword—
Up and dwell with me!”
Rona felt the drawing skyward,—
Seized a ngaio tree.

But from earth the ngaio parted
Like a bitten thread:
Like a comet, upward darted
Rona overhead.

In the moon is Rona sitting,
Never to be free;
With the gourd she held in flitting,
And the ngaio tree.

Rona and the moon together
Wage unending strife:
Deep in the abysses nether
One had yielded life,

But for it, the Lake of Heaven,
Great Waiora cool;
Where they wash for evens seven
In the crystal pool.

There Waiora’s living waters
Purge the battle stain;
There the ancient angry daughters
Lave and grow again.

You’ll never break the prison golden,—
Never, late or soon,
Rona, Rona, sister olden,—
Rona in the moon!