Well-known as a stand up comic and folk musician, Mike Harding is now equally known for his rich and varied poetry.
Music, place, landscape, politics, memories and stories have always been Mike Harding’s creative touchstones, never more so than in ‘The Lonely Zoroastrian‘, his first collection since the 2020 pandemic and lockdown, both of which feature in some of the earlier poems in this book.
Storytelling is the essence of his work whether telling the true story of a lost city buried under the ice cap, the curse an old Ukrainian woman laid on a group of Russian soldiers or stories from his beloved Connemara like Islandman and St Luke’s Little Summer.
From his ‘little shed of words’ here is Mike Harding ‘singing about the dark times‘.
Nurse
Hardly ten minutes dead you lay
In that just pre-dawn hospital room,
And we had watched you go,
Your very last words a shout, “No! No more, no!”
Then you were gone and then there was no more.
And now you were alone and pooled
In silence, washed by the gentle
Ticking of your bedside clock,
The random mutterings of the early traffic far away
As the old world rolling in
Put on its many-coloured coat of everyday.
I walked outside and stood to watch
The dawn that you would never see.
The paring of a dying moon webbed in
The branches of a winter tree.
An early blackbird, far off, sang alone
As I listened to the city starting up,
Its mechanical heart unconscious
Of a universal story being told
Here at its very core. Then, feeling cold,
I made my way out of the cool
Dawn air back to the family room once more.
As I walked past your open door
I was stopped, held fast and snared
By the web of a whispering voice,
And I looked in stood quietly watching as,
Not knowing I was there
A nurse was gently settling you,
Un-hooking drips, smoothing your hair,
And talking all the while; holding
Your hand, stroking, explaining.
She spoke your name with every move,
Addressing you you as though you were still here,
As though you were just dozing, slumbering
And she was softly waking you for a new day come;
Making you ready for, just one more time,
Your last big ramble on the hill, your last ben climbed.
Untrammelled as you came
You now would leave the world.
And she, gracious, attentive,
With a sponge and bowl,
A stranger, loving, caring,
As day drew trees and rooftops on the waking sky,
Was talking gently, softly to your slowly waning soul.