NORTON HODGES

Old Hippie

Your ideals are now the stuff of style mags,

Return of the Kaftan! Peace and Love Designer T-shirts!

And how to reconcile the Buddhist tech bros

with all that seeking you did on the hard path?

What can you do now broadband is the royal road?

Throw red paint at masterpieces in the Tate?

Strap on a rucksack and board your electric bike?

Watch TV and cultivate your garden?

Can you still have solidarity with the workers

then turn the page to the book reviews?

Looks like while you were biting your nails

life had other plans; another tale was being told.

And after all this, to die at Astapovo

before the clear light of your rightful end.

In 1910, Leo Tolstoy fell ill and died at Astapovo station, after fleeing his domestic situation and never finishing his final journey,

Old Man Walking

This solitary walker set out early before the killing heat

and welcomes the cool patchwork of shadows and light

beneath the trees with their dark secret roots.

They knew I was coming before I reached their shade.

Their knowledge is older and wiser than the mind

of someone still plagued by the tinnitus of war,

autocrats, social media chatter and Spotify,

a quieter essential more fundamental archive.

Who are we to judge and destroy, to pillage

in the name of all that can be analysed,

monetised, surveilled every micro-second?

We need to see ourselves as in a Chinese scroll,

tiny scrabbling creatures on a fragile bridge

while the great forests and mountains amusedly look on.

Norton Hodges is a poet, editor and translator. His work is widely published on the internet and in hard copy. He is the author of Bare Bones (The High Window Press, Grimsby, UK, 2018). He lives in Lincoln UK.

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