A Temporal Phonology of Birdsong
by Oz Hardwick
Birds on wires thread beady eyes, their sharp beaks pecking at the edge of words. Call, they insist, Call, Call, but every coin in my pocket is bent, or foreign, or a poor forgery hammered from nothing but breath and sawdust; and, besides, the phone box is a pandemonium of birds squabbling over seeds someone spilled from a bag of homegrown as they rolled against one too many implacably fleeting nights. A bird in the bush gestures, impatient, to the mobile in my pocket, but the battery’s dead, along with more and more of my contacts, along with more and more of the birds in cages in quayside barrooms and would-be ballerinas’ bedrooms, and all those ends which might have carried warm arms and a dazzling transformation. Then the bird in my hand winks at a can with a string punched through that stretches further than an eagle’s eye could dream. Call, it says, in a voice I know from a long time ago, and I speak like tears into bright tin and taut emotion. When I place it against my ear, it’s warmer than I expect, and I hear waves stroking the shore, an engine humming into life on a summer afternoon, and wings fluttering into the pattern of speech. Feather, it says, or it might be Father.
Oz Hardwick is a European poet and academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “about a dozen” full collections and chapbooks, including Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) which won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and most recently A Census of Preconceptions (Dublin & Reggio di Calabria: SurVision Books, 2022). With Anne Caldwell, he edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022). Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.