Untitled (If You Have Linen Women) by Robin Hyde

If you have linen women, raspberry women

Red and thick of the mouth, with dock-leaf women
(Little light foxy spores – mind them, such women,)
If you have green grape women, flour-bin women,
Amber-in-forest, wild-mint-scented women,
Trey-bit in church or drudging kit-bag women,
Little sad bedraggled wind-has-weazened-one women,
White bean women, perhaps anemone women.
And harp-like facing the starlight women,
Young Bronzey Plumage, what will you do with women?

If you have poppy women, moth-due women

Tinkering wings in the dark... thin alley women

Lit with their scared, bruised eyes, (watch them, such women

Editor: Janis Freegard

I came across this fragment of a poem while browsing through Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde, edited and introduced by Michele Leggott  (Auckland University Press, 2003).  I love the richness of the language she uses, the sounds and the building rhythm.  I'm curious to know how she might have finished it.

While a great deal of Hyde’s work is complete, and collected, it got me thinking about how much of literature survives through fragments – the works of Sappho, for example.  A tantalising sliver of a poem can leave us wondering about the whole, the turns it might have taken, the feelings it might have evoked.  In this case, we get the start of the journey, but not the final destination.


Robin Hyde is the pseudonym of Iris Wilkinson (1906–39), a major New Zealand writer of poetry, fiction and journalism.  She was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and brought to Wellington as a baby.  She also travelled to Australia, China and England as an adult. 

Her first book of poetry, The Desolate Star, was published in 1929. She also published the novels Passport to Hell (1936), Check To Your King (1936), Wednesday's Children (1937), Nor the Years Condemn (1938), and The Godwits Fly (1938).

When you've read Robin Hyde's poem get your teeth into the sidebar for up to thirty more poems from our Tuesday Poets.

The Tuesday Poem editor this week is Janis Freegard, author of the poetry collection Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus (AUP, 2011) and a chapbook The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider (Anomalous Press, 2013), and co-author of AUP New Poets 3 (2008).  She blogs at janisfreegard.com