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Chris Hardy poems
Athene Noctua
We felt we were being watched
and turning saw an owl
poised on a rock at midday
still and intent.
There were grasshoppers
on the hill behind the beach
and damselflies flickering
along the water’s edge
but for the moment
the small bird considered
whether we could remain.
She drew everything to her,
even the sea stopped moving
then she was gone as if
she’d not been there.
The crickets and the sea
were allowed to sing again
and the place
was an ounce lighter
now its soul had left.
You get up from your mother’s bed
and catch the bus outside her house.
When it stops you get off,
walk through a door and start working.
People come in and out,
you go away with some of them,
into the country, another city,
across the sea.
One day you find yourself
a long way from where you began.
You think for a while about how
it turned out like this.
You can recall what you did
and why you did it, more or less,
but each event is like a page
you wrote your reasons on
then lost, a trail of scraps
blown off tables in street cafés,
not a book beside your mother’s bed.
And you know it doesn’t matter
that there is no story.
The sun always sets in the west
even on the other side of the world.
The sea and sky change by the minute,
the records we have kept
fill miles of paper,
and we have decided
they tell us nothing.
remembers, in its head
at the top of the world.
Grains of dirt
seed the mile deep lobe,
like recollections
left when you wake
from a dream
about an atom bomb
exploding on the horizon,
a column of smoke,
a canopy of fire,
white streaks
racing towards you
from where
the end begins.
But the sea
remembers nothing,
dust sinks
in its great eye.
Stars’ silver thorns,
ships’ thin cuts,
the sun’s needle,
soothed away
when the tide blinks.
Sees children
throwing sticks,
and how the land
disappears beneath trees,
where to
it does not know,
deep in its socket, shaped
like a memory of the moon.
‘The ocean has … no memory’,
Joseph Conrad, ‘The Mirror Of The Sea’.
I don’t believe in God
but know there is a God,
who has no face
but has a face,
who cannot speak
but speaks.
My mother believed in God
and then he vanished
with his book,
so there was nothing left
for her to trust or read.
My Dad knew God
was one of those
who sent his brothers
down the pit
and killed his Mum.
He knew the hymns
and sang in Church
when ceremony required.
Outside in the graveyard
music hung in the air
like scent and
looking up the spire
sped through the sky,
a ship’s prow
spilling white dolphins.
There was nothing more to say.