Sometimes I Believe I’m a Moroccan Poet Exiled on Mars

Myronn Hardy

But I’m from the middle of another country.My cells are snow crystals with faults perpetuallybreaking      fusing to others.I see red       violet in an opal sky.In autumn         the pies are pumpkin         cherry.But for nine years I’ve written poemsnear seawater         on beaches wherecamels graze longing not to see seas.But I want to see them.Nor storms swirling pages to ash.So much red moving clockwise         counter.Where are the clocks? Time as pastoral.The budding         bursting         the flightof seeds         the spheres of haywound on land purged.But all I see is dust         my hand in dust.I’m writing in dust.What I’m writing will become dust.I’m the premonitionof dust exiled here.

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Myronn Hardy is the author of, most recently, Aurora Americana published by Princeton University Press. His poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, POETRY, the Georgia Review, The Baffler, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine.

cover of Aurora Americana

Princeton, New Jersey

Princeton University

"A clear-eyed vantage of America. . . . [Aurora Americana] is in itself the record of a complicated parting triggered by being an expatriate, and the necessity of returning home."
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Poetry Foundation

“Myronn Hardy’s tough, analytical, associative mind moves with astonishing inventiveness between America and Algeria, and between persona and his own speaking voice, as in the splendid title poem. His idiom is as spare as it is singular, but never obtuse or unmoored from ordinary human concerns. Quietly visionary, Aurora Americana is among the best books of poems I’ve read in a long time.”
—Tom Sleigh

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