Oz Hardwick
It was the last perfect summer, the last year we tried to fly, and I remember how we all lined up at the end of the pier with our lovingly crafted wings. There was fibreglass, feathers, hardboard, cardboard, silk, and silver foil, all strapped to suntanned shoulders as we weighed up sky and sea. The man from the local paper was there, asking everyone how and why, and there was even a crew from national TV, for a two-minute spot before the evening weather. One by one, we threw ourselves to blue, embraced by falling and the whooping of friends, families, and all the lost sailors who had swum ashore for the last great innocent spectacle. And then the bureaucrats came, with their clipboards and prohibitions; and autumn came, with its storms and other distractions; and at some point the pier closed its turnstiles for good. It’s one of those things that was soon forgotten, though there’s a small exhibit in the town museum, and on a bench outside the ice cream parlour there’s a plaque to remember those few who never landed.
Oz Hardwick has published “maybe fifteen?” collections, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog, 2024). He has been described as a “major proponent of the neo-surreal prose poem in Britain,” and in 2022 was recipient of the ARC Poetry Prize for “a lifetime service to the cause of prose poetry”.
andotherpoems.com 