Oz Hardwick

York

 

Oz Hardwick’s poetry has been published and performed internationally in and on all manner of media. His chapbook Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI/Recent Work, 2018) was the 2019 Rubery International Book Award poetry winner. He has also edited several anthologies, most recently The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) with Anne Caldwell. Oz leads the postgraduate Creative Writing programmes at Leeds Trinity University

 

poem completed 15th April 2020.

 

 

Inessential

 

Dibbing and sifting, I plant seeds on the ring road under cover of darkness. I, like so many, am inessential – it came as no surprise – but I do what I can, and my office drawer was stuffed with bright envelopes that had slipped from unread monthly magazines: Grow Your Own Vegetables; Wildflower Meadow; Grade A Marijuana; Monastic Herb Garden. I mixed them together in a pannier at my waist like I saw in the Luttrell Psalter, but decided to plant each one separately: 4cm deep, 45cm apart. The birds were disappointed from the start, eyeing me disapprovingly from fence posts and telephone wires, but I’ve learned to carry judgment lightly. Word spread and their numbers grew, but I paid them no mind, bending to the task with focused assiduity; and even when they began perching on my shoulders, tugging my hair with greedy claws, I paid them no mind and continued my mechanical labours. There is nothing to identify as weather here, and time is just the distance from one earth-sealed hole to the next. Behind me could be forest or desert, or just cracked tarmac dreaming of wheels.