From Silence to Spoken Word: A Poet Reclaims Her Voice

Toni Hardy can work in a laboratory, write a book, step up to a microphone and find her way around a country she’s never visited before.

But there was a time when she couldn’t quite find her way back to herself.

The Baltimore spoken word artist, who has traveled to 36 countries and written eight books, remembers losing interest in the things and people she loved while in a relationship she describes as emotionally abusive and manipulative. The woman accustomed to exploring the world found her world shrinking.

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“I realized that I was really losing myself,” Hardy says. “I had no desire to do anything, no desire to be around anyone.”

Now, at 35, she is making room in her poetry for that trauma — and for the women listening who might recognize their own.

‘Sometimes We Go Through Things’

When invited to present a poem about domestic abuse at a recent church gathering, Hardy hesitated. Writing was familiar territory. This kind of public disclosure was something else.

“I didn’t want to be transparent,” Hardy says.

She had spent years protecting her privacy, including from people who loved her. Now Hardy was being asked to put words around an experience she had struggled to share. 

Her faith helped her answer: “The Holy Spirit had to remind me that … sometimes we go through things to help other people as well.”

So Hardy wrote it.

Then about a week later, she stood before an audience with something new to say.

Hardy’s relationship with words began long before her difficult relationship.

As a child growing up in West Baltimore, she took inspiration from her grandmother, Elvira Johnson, a poet whose work remains unpublished. A substantial collection of her grandmother’s poems, Hardy says, is waiting for the family to bring it into print.

In the meantime, Hardy has been busy. She has published eight books available on Amazon. She performs at open mics around Baltimore, including Busboys and Poets and Pure Poetry Live, where she has shared her work. Her home church, Victorious Ministries International in East Baltimore, holds an annual poetry event where she also performs.

Lived Experience as Subject Matter

Hardy has not yet published a poetry collection. For now, her words get to meet people in person. Her subjects come from lived experience and from the world around her — whatever moves her enough to make her sit down and write. Faith carries that desire through her work: to help people recognize their worth and act on their purpose.

And then there is her other work: her job in an animal diagnostic research laboratory. She wants to return to school to pursue molecular biology, with a particular interest in studying cancer cells.

Science and spoken word. Research and rhythm. She has even spent time figuring out how those interests fit together.

“I’ve always felt drawn to science, and then my passion is art,” she says.

For the moment, both have a place in her life. So does a clothing brand. So does the dream of supporting herself through the things she creates.

“I want to use my spoken word and my books and my clothing just to inspire people,” she says.

Hardy’s curiosity has also taken her well beyond Baltimore. Family vacations planted the interest early. Later, watching a cousin build a life abroad made the possibility feel closer.

Hardy has since traveled through Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, including living in China for nearly a year.

“God made this amazing world, and I just wanted to see it,” she says.

She would like to live abroad again, perhaps in Costa Rica or somewhere in Asia. For now, she is at home in Baltimore.

“I’ll be here until God says otherwise.”

It is a life with possibilities. Places to go. Work to do. Words still waiting to be written. It all makes her account of losing herself especially poignant. A person can have gifts, ambitions and people who love her, and still struggle to believe she deserves better than what she is enduring.

Hardy wants to be honest about that, too.

A Breaking Point

She says by about six months into the relationship, she was losing herself, withdrawing from people and experiencing major depression.

“At year three,” she says, “I remember praying the prayer to God, literally, ‘Take this person out of my life and kill me.’” She called that her “breaking point.” 

Near the end of the interview, Hardy spoke again about the relationship. She wanted to explain why she had stayed.

“I didn’t think I deserved better at that stage in my life,” Hardy says. “I didn’t have a good sense of self. I didn’t believe that I was created for more.”

She had somewhere to go; she could return to her family. She describes an “amazing support system.” Still, reaching for that support meant letting people see something she had kept private.

“I didn’t want my family and my loved ones to know that I was struggling in that area.”

Some had already noticed a change. People pulled her aside. They told her she didn’t seem like herself.

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After she left, she changed her phone number, blocked contact and stepped away from social media to keep her former partner from reaching her.

Now she is choosing what to share, and why.

Her poetry gives her a way to speak to someone who may be sitting quietly with a similar experience — someone whose loved ones have noticed a change, someone who has stopped doing the things that once brought her joy.

Hardy’s appeal to that person is direct: “Don’t be afraid to reach out for help,” from a friend, a loved one or even someone at church.

“You don’t have to tell them everything,” she says.