New Zealand Verse/A Leaf from a Fly-book

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XLV.

A Leaf from a Fly-book.

The king’s road is a troublous summons calling day and day;But my feet take the cocksfoot track—the easy, vagrant way:Beside the restless acres and the gold of noisy gorse,The ripple lures its lover down the dazzle of its course.
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Its speech is of the willow-reaches rich with lurking joy;The revel of the rapids where gay life is death’s decoy:My heart is with the laughing lips; I follow up and down;But follow not the king’s white road toward the haste of town.
Afoot, the wash of waders, and aloft, the haze-veiled blue,—The heart it needeth nothing so the cast fall clean and true.O carol of the running reel, O flash of mottled back!And who will take the king’s white road, and who the cocksfoot track?
The hour-glass fills with weather like a wine of slow content:I throw the world behind me as a cartridge that is spent.Then home by summer starlight bear my grass-cool, mottled load;I quit the pleasant cocksfoot track: I take the king’s white road.

Seaforth Mackenzie.

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