Three Poems by Jeff Hardin

A Day Not Far From This One

What’s this need to say things right, as though
a voice had power to make words absolute.  Only one
said, “It is finished.” We say, “What comes next?”

We give speeches, write books, compose symphonies,
try to stand in the silences expanding our words,
but all the while we’re only salmon leaping upstream.

Grandmother’s prayer journal goes up in a funnel.
Such loss is hard to take, but we always knew her prayers
could not be bound, would fly out over the world.

Grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles, parents, everyone
on the porch, telling the same tales as always, yet
nothing seemed predictable, nothing already known.

A day not far from this one will also come and go.
From chestnut trees, extinct, leaves continue falling.
What I’ve whispered to night wakes shining from dew.

A Voice Imagined as My Own

I can, with little effort, produce inside me
a voice imagined—maybe my own but just as
likely someone waiting on the barn door to close.

What does it mean, though, to seek so much
meaning, rarely satisfied, seldom comforted,
always older but still just a child before elders?

Fate, destiny, one’s lot in life, what-have-you,
is a funny thing—sometimes it finds us,
and other times we have to go searching for it.

Well, I was bored one day, and that’s how I
stumbled into who I am, and now I wake up
busy, falling farther and farther behind.

I might just as easily have become a shepherd
humming a lullaby, alone with the stars, one
seeming to brighten, then beginning to move.

Like Snow, Like Manna

Early December morning, no pasture near, 
yet still I settle into a gait first learned at
the side of a man heading out to tend cows.

Wherever I go, answers fall like snow on my tongue.
Even so, I’ve no explanation how forgiveness
climbs up out of the deep-drenched darkest of hearts.

We might have lived in a heroic age and not
known it. We might have been exiles or nomads.
Manna may have fallen we stepped wide around.

Today I’ve chosen to give up my mind, whatever
it hoped to pursue. I’ll search, instead, places
a dove alights, wandering the absence of its mate.

The mind may be little more than sage grass
moved upon—breathed upon?—each word
slendering out to the farthest length of itself.

Jeff Hardin is the author of six collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary (Nicholas Roerich Prize); Notes for a Praise Book (Jacar Press Book Award); Restoring the Narrative (Donald Justice Prize); Small Revolution; No Other Kind of World (X. J. Kennedy Prize), and A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being. The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, North American Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Hotel Amerika, and Southern Poetry Review have published his poems. He teaches at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN.