Poems for 7/11/22 - "For Thomas Hardy" by Jane Cooper and "Nobody Comes" by Thomas Hardy

Jane Cooper - (1924-2007)

"For Thomas Hardy"

(after reading "Nobody Comes," dated on my birthday)

But you were wrong that desolate dusk

When up the street the crawl

Of age and night grew tall

As a shadow-self leaning away

From the gray religious husk

Of a streetlamp keeping watch above dead day.

Another took some risk.

You thought yourself alone

In a world whose nearest ghost

Was the alien pentecost

Of strumming telegraph, the throb

Of a motor quickly gone--

While over the animal sea my outraged sob Took life from the same dawn.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

"Nobody Comes"

TREE-LEAVES labour up and down,
And through them the fainting light
Succumbs to the crawl of night.
Outside in the road the telegraph wire
To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travelers like a spectral lyre
Swept by a spectral hand.

A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
That flash upon a tree:
It has nothing to do with me,
And whangs along in a world of its own,
Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,
And nobody pulls up there.
                                      — 9 October 1924

[first published in Hardy's Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (1925).]