Waking Up

The night before we left we smoked opium
for the first time and didn’t sleep.
In Brindisi we lay down in a corridor and slept
before the ferry took us to an island where
there was a warehouse for the mad.

(Now I know the mad are awake with dreams
like when my mother sat by me her grey hair
dyed black my mother never dyed her hair
she was telling me things might have been different).

We laid our sleeping bags zipped together
and slept above the bows where once I saw
dolphins racing faster than the ship.
They sleep in the surface, in the shallows.

On the island we slept hot afternoons.
A shepherd watched from his hillside camp
when we lay naked on the beach.
We were unafraid. He was a shepherd.

The chief of police invited us to tea
and showed how he could
watch our tent across the bay
through the telescope on his balcony.

Walking quietly back I was cursed
for going shirtless in the evening heat
by a woman driving a bull into a shed,
his cullion gourds swung by her knees.

After the goat dance wine we
held hands along the cliff path
so as not to fall to sleep in
the squid fishers’ floodlit sea.

The last night of the journey home we slept
in a barn, our breath froze round our lips,
back in the land of cold and opium at least
they’d said it was opium and we’d believed them
because we still believed.

Chris Hardy‘s poems have appeared widely in magazines and online. He was shortlisted in the 2024 National Poetry Competition and won the 2024 McLellan Poetry Prize. His new collection from Shoestring Press will be published later in 2025.