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At Twilight: A Poem

Nobody will come, nothing will change,
The day will continue to drag its hours
Through dusk, evening, then the night:
The cold will intensify, lodge in flesh,
In the bone, the silence tighten its hold.
The creatures outside – the visible birds –
Pursue their instinctive purpose of flight
Feeding, perch, chatter: perhaps they feel
The breeze now disturbing the garden,
But it is nothing to them, it is what is.
And they too are among the figments
Of what is, brought into sustenance or
Scarcity: neither comprehended any more
Than themselves; they and the world
Exist just as they vary and they remain.
The light is starting to fail, the sky turning
Blank, hardening to grey: the last of
The birds take themselves off, becoming
Invisible behind an occasional sound,
As I am, behind these remnants, words.
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Harold Jones is a New Zealander, educated at Cambridge University, where he was awarded an Exhibition to read English. His poetry has been widely published in UK and NZ literary journals. He has been a prize-winner in national UK and NZ poetry competitions, and, as a lyricist, in the UK Songwriting Contest, the largest such event in the world. A selection of his work in AUP New Poets Four (Auckland University Press, 2011), drew the UK review, “this excellent poet, a kind of Ted Hughes crossed with Bukowski,” with a further selection, Curriculum Vitae (Xlibris, 2014), reviewed in NZ as “downright incredible.” His work has won the acclaim of pre-eminent critics and poets: among them, Al Alvarez, “I like the elegance and control, the drive to say something rather than just to cut a fashionable figure," and Ted Hughes, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.” In the US his poems appear in Merion West and VoegelinView.

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