DON’T GROW UP

Though I have so often wished to make that turn,

if I could, spin the car round, not let each second

take me further from what I didn’t see in time,

the years have taught me not to regret the one that got away,

the one I didn’t choose, the view the trees wouldn’t let me see.

I’ve learnt to see through the assumption the opposite to what I’ve got would have been worth having,

like girls I let slip I shouldn’t have.

I’ve lived enough not to stare too long in the rear-view mirror,

images of longing, too tardy reflection.

I’m too grown up to suspect an alternative could be better,

a happiness parallel to the lot one’s born with exists.

Only, one time, a day or two ago, or maybe decades past, when an extra clearing in the wood gave me a second chance,

and, in an unexpected burst of sunlight, the others agreed to stop,

I walked enraptured, in the warm evening,

amidst the heather in undulating terrain

with a mix of colours I could mumble and jumble

to my heart’s content, and can, even now.

I might learn the simple tale that wistful dreams,

the stab in the heart that I should have tried harder,

and taken that turning into what looked like a splash of paradise,

can, if I never quite grow up, lead somewhere.

LIFE

On finishing a poem, its latest churlish redrafting,

clicking off the page, closing the file,

I recall, from an eternity ago, a time when,

I suppose, I turned the page over, closed the book,

laid down my pencil,

paused, looked up.

It has a feel. A taste. A smell.

A presence.

I recall what a time and place felt like.

It was in Italy. I was a teenager.

Grandmother

and aunts littered the place.

An uncle or two.That moment comes back.

Its curious plastic-like perfume.

A dead second or so is reanimated.

I feel most alive when I kick over my charred remains,

and observe a flicker, or two.

RAMBLING

Land stretching out below to one side,

the sun warms me as I snake by fences

and along curves of trodden earth.

I turn round to watch him and his dogs

striding along the footpath, outpacing me,

the dips in the fields cancelling him out,

only for him to reappear as I keep looking back.

I saw some minutes ago a man

loitering by a clump of trees, waiting,

I hadn’t spotted till I was close.

Trees and bushes, fields and country paths

can be scary places. 

No longer alone as you had thought,

you find yourself in a large, large space with nowhere to hide.

Alan Hardy has for many years run an English language school for foreign students (in UK). He’s been published in such magazines as Ink Sweat & Tears, Envoi, Iota, Poetry Salzburg, The Interpreter’s House, Littoral, Orbis, South, Pulsar, Lothlorien, 100subtexts, Fixator, Chewers, Feversofthemind, Suburban Witchcraft and others. Poetry pamphlets Wasted Leaves (1996) and I Went with Her (2007). Though he has just recently started submitting again (after a little pause), he has always kept writing (and reading) poems.