Five Poems by Alan Hardy

 

POINT OF VIEW 

 

Pause on hearing my voice, 

dry throat punching the air 

for words to fill the space, 

gives away  

she was expecting another answering tone. 

 

The phone passed over to the interesting party, 

her polite fumblings in my ears, 

I resume my repose on my ruffled settee. 

The four walls I sit in 

refocus my importance. 

 

 

 

THE MODERN WORLD 

 

I watch a film from 

the decade I joined the world, 

jolt at vehicles’ askew angles and shapes, 

words and noises’ curious jar. 

Acknowledge an age passed into quaintness. 

In its streets and houses, 

its moving parts, its brooding background, 

recognize this was where modernity began. 

Awkward forms the age’s technological know-how  

welded things into, 

are the precursor of what I observe now. 

The link is not missing. 

In those neanderthal images, clumsy and funny, 

I have a vague recollection of me moving 

among them. A life in me stirs. An old photo 

makes me remember me in one like it. 

Blurry, grey, primitive. A familiarity I sense. 

I feel an approximation to. Where it all started.  

The modern world I was shaped in. That led to me now. 

I see the life here and now, in my veins, 

in the grainy pictures I don’t laugh at all.  

At my birth, the modern world began. 

The world that's mine. 

The world that will stay modern as long as 

I live. 

 

 

 

LATER  

 

In the freezing cold we walked from lane to road  

to countryside to town. We entered shops, bought an item. 

Or two. Went for a walk through the museum’s rooms. 

Spoke of times past when we looked out 

from that balcony on to the row of houses opposite. 

Strode about the large room overlooking the main road.  

We lingered, snatched more and more 

snippets of time, not to return home.  

We dreaded what we might find opening that door. 

Outside in the cold we could keep away from the phantoms 

in our heads that we glimpsed moved like shadows,  

ill-defined, hastily scrawled, barely recalled, in the rooms 

we would step into. Later. 

We glanced down at the watercress beds,  

held in winter’s dull clamminess, pressed 

on along the winding path leading us around the lake, 

around the house we would return to. Later. 

The cold entered our bones, gusts slapped our faces.  

Almost gently. We could only delay so long.  

Spoke about many things, walked by where we had walked 

before. We strolled down the road, hands tightening scarves 

around our necks, leading us home. 

We opened the door. We could relax.  

There would be phantoms. Later. 

 

 

 

CHILDHOOD 

 

At ease, cheeky, happy, she’d love to go back to that time, 

her arm around the old man, hand on his shoulder, facing 

the camera with a big smile, reassured, protected, ignorant 

of anything to come. Immersed in that eternal present. 

Summer holidays with the grandparents on their farm. 

 

Picking fruit from the garden’s abundant trees. 

The old man at her side, seated. 

Childhood entices her into its unquestioning, easy warmth. 

Childhood is a siren, calling her back. Telling tales. 

How things were on sunny days running through fields, 

in the evening sitting outside watching the sun go down, 

arm around an old man. 

Childhood doesn’t let her go. It holds her back 

with powerful claws, ominously right behind, paralysing 

each step, each glance. 

Shaking herself free would be turning her life into a lie. 

As if the old man her arm is around, could die. 

As if it couldn’t go on like this forever. 

Horrifying phantoms worm through her, 

slither into every part of her body, every thought. 

She grows into a monster, a tiny mind in a steadily enlarging body. 

A grotesque mismatch. A hybrid with mad, scary stares. 

Long bony fingers look for eyes to gouge out. 

 

 

 

THE WAY 

 

I was looking forward to the stroll home, 

slightly chilly, the path winding its early evening gloom, 

walking by her side, ready to share with her everything 

I would try to express. Remember. Vague recollections mumbled. 

Just by curving snugly into the lane’s hold, trees on each side, 

land shaped like countryside a few metres beyond, 

the muggy air was drawing us further and further in to 

something that had time enough to materialise. 

I wasn’t sure what it would be. Just the thing it would become. 

In the misty evening. It was nicely set up. 

The mobile rang. He chatted to me the length of the journey. 

Petty things. Idle nonsense. Memories. Bits of information. 

She listened in. Suggested, mouthing words, lines of enquiry. 

Things she wanted to know. Joined in silently. Made me relax into 

embracing the conversation as I walked along the way. 

I enjoyed it. So did she. It gave shape to our stroll. Took it over.  

It filled the void with something. We no longer had to look. 

Maybe not find our way.

Alan Hardy is an English teacher, for many years running a language school for foreign students. As well as Lothlorien Poetry Journal, he's been published in such magazines as Ink Sweat & Tears, Militant Thistles, Suburban Witchcraft, Envoi, Iota, Poetry Salzburg, The Interpreter’s House, Orbis, South, Littoral and others. He is now submitting work much more regularly following a pause of a few years, although he has never stopped writing poetry.