Poem of the Week Oz Hardwick

August 19, 2024

Oz Hardwick

Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. Oz has performed internationally at major festivals and in tiny coffee shops. As a child, Oz wanted to be an astronaut – some days he is.

Backstory

I have a complicated relationship with time, but a precise sense of rhythm. This poem negotiates the space between the two as in-breath, out-breath, and the disciplined chance of the marks we make as we describe a world that isn’t made up of things, but of events: not sequences, but semi-transparent layers.

Abstract Expressionism as Breathing Exercise

I painted time closed, sealing the cracks between now and all those possible thens. There was shame in the water, shame in the air, and my hands were sweating in borrowed driving gloves as I wheeled through the whispering country, tempted by the colours crooning from the radio. There were riots on the streets and rockets to the Moon, and my flesh felt complicit with all those significant transitions. The earth drummed with dancers, the road rose up like a bladder on a stick, and my bones ached with all those repeated traditions. And I remembered a room, loaded with tissue-thin reputations, flickering with silent videos of cities built by workaday heroes, the spit of my dad. And I remembered my mother, waving a warning flare in a slow arc as the whole world crumbled and fell away. And I was lost in a stolen car, or perhaps a stolen moment. Or maybe it was just a still moment amongst all the collapsing scenery. I picked up a paintbrush, freighted with reputations, frightened of rep-rep-repetitions, and sealed the cracks between then and all those possible nows.