◊
Second Birth
by Tom Hardie
I am not Tom
Hardie.
I do not exist — just
figments
of my imagination’s
cerebral mist; or
am I merely the Tom Hardie
born of my father’s fists?
◊
Category: 1. Being Tom Hardie
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Response
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
He erases himself in the first stanza, wanders into the middle two stanza’s — a Buddhist-lite existentialism — and collapses into a final stanza with an image of childhood trauma.
The emotions of this poem are in constant flux. I never know how I am supposed to feel. Like an actual trauma, the nightmare vision comes from nowhere. It shatters the playful philosophizing of the rest of the poem. The peace is shattered by the “father’s fists.”
This is Tom Hardie’s technique: the poet tries to traumatize the reader with poetics, in order to accurately communicate his own trauma.