Yesterday it was still January and I drove home
and the roads were wet and the fields were wet
and a palette knife
had spread a slab of dark blue forestry across the hill.
A splashed white van appeared from a side road
then turned off and I drove on into the drab morning
which was mudded and plain and there was a kind of weary happiness
that nothing was trying to be anything much and nothing
was being suggested. I don’t know how else to explain
the calm of this grey wetness with hardly a glimmer of light or life,
only my car tyres swishing the lying water,
and the crows balanced and rocking on the windy lines.
Copyright © 2025 by Kerry Hardie. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 16, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I was driving home in the almost-dusk of the back-end of January. I was stuck in the middle of Ireland, its patterning of farmland and rivers, of small hills and twisting roads, and it had been raining for days, the sky low, the land sodden. I was tired and tense with the expectations of all I was supposed to have done and hadn’t; of the unquiet, angry world beyond … I don’t know where the quiet came from, but once it was there it settled, and there didn’t seem to be anything that didn’t belong inside it. Later I recognised the poem’s connection with ‘The Darkling Thrush’ by the nineteenth-century English poet Thomas Hardy, but Hardy’s poem lifts to pure hope, while mine finds only an existential peace.”
—Kerry Hardie
