Three Poems

Rob Hardy

Poet Laureate of Northfield, Minnesota

Jane Austen’s House at Chawton

Written in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, U.K.

These Hampshire hills, so brown in winter, and all this mud! How dull it must have been for the girl with her mind on balls, the flirt and dreamer with nothing to do indoors but invent lovers and impossible odds, or publish imaginary banns for herself in copies of the parish register. But how ideal for the sensible woman who sits and writes, who has stopped imagining happiness for herself, and so creates it for someone else this rain-blurred world refocused in her mind into images so sharp they stand out from everything here, all this furniture borrowed from the written world.

Reading Rebecca, Far from Home

Du Maurier understood homesickness: she filled a book with it, with the remembered scent of crushed azalea petals, with the rhododendrons hemorrhaging into bloom, the moan of wood pigeons haunting the woods like voices speaking softly in another room. She knew the slips and evasions of memory, and how it can sometimes hurt to get too close to something so distant. Better to forget oneself in the strange, indifferent sea.

Light

November 9, 2016

Through the sleepless night Orion still strode above the rooftops of the town. The sunrise still unfurled its pink and blue as if announcing a birth. The sun still rose, and as it rose it burnished the prairie grass. Nothing had been taken from the beauty of the world. Even the raucous geese were beautiful with the light of morning on their wings. Even the gray November woods were filled with light. A young woman stepped from the path to walk in the fallen leaves, just for the pleasure of the music they made. The leaves whispered at her feet. The light seemed to rise up from the earth, upthestemsofthegrass,intothebarebranchesofthetrees. The light was all around us. And still it rises.