Two poems: one from a local, and one from a fascist. That Baxter was not: his father, who was a conscientious objector during the first war, is now fashionable. Baxter was too brutal, too honest, too drunk and Catholic to remain in the politically correct pantheon. And Pound chose the wrong side in the war, and suffered thereafter.

Both fear the Gods that their poetry may stir up: both feared the cost. Both paid it anyway.

East Coast Journey

About twilight we came to the whitewashed pub
On a knuckle of land above the bay

Where a log was riding and the slow
Bird-winged breakers cast up spray.

One of the drinkers round packing cases had
The worn face of a kumara god,

Or so it struck me. Later on
Lying awake in the veranda bedroom

In great dryness of mind I heard the voice of the sea
Reverberating, and thought: As a man

Grows older he does not want beer, bread, or the prancing flesh,
But the arms of the eater of life, Hine-nui-te-po,

With teeth of obsidian and hair like kelp
Flashing and glimmering at the edge of the horizon.

JAMES K. BAXTER
Notes for Canto CXX

I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
      Let the wind speak
        that is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I
        have made
Let those I love try to forgive
        what I have made.

Ezra Pound

There is no Jerusalem in this life, but in the life beyond there will be a new Jerusalem. When we look to that we are blinded, and we seek to hide. Our mythos may help us, but the moderns both reject the myth in which you can hide and the Christ who brings in the new world. More fool they.