Morning List
Aromas of snuffed out candles
A new bar of soap
The fix of fresh black coffee
A warm fruit teacake
smothered in melting butter
First sight and smell
of the salty sea
© copyright David Francis Barker 2011
Category: art
Poem ‘Witness’
Witness
Deep in the darkest place
we feel a faint memory is
lurking unbound like a freeze
on the fast spinning world
a rare sight for we strangers
from the far flung parts
of tenuous space
We must have strolled
those ragged shores
leaving no footprints in the sand
and breathed in deep
the unbreathable air
before sentient life could
crawl out from the sea
We saw the infant sun spill
his light over jagged horizons
and a shattered moon
ascend into sparse skies
to ride across that curious
scatter of stars
Was it us who fostered
the mortal pain of eons?
And did we sanction suffering
from simplicity to sublimity
all borne through this weary flux?
That we were witness
when it began – is true
We will persist to its end
to see star stuff blasted out
when it all starts over again
© copyright Francis Barker 2011
* I’ve had a version of this poem hanging around since I was about 17. This is the latest incarnation and I’m still not satisfied.
* The ‘painting’ is a ‘photoshopped’ adaptation from another painting.
Cat’s Eye is my Favorite Stephen King Book
New Poem ‘April Promise’
April Promise
Full of April promise
so many times we’d disappear
to where the canal boats moored
make-believing one of them ours
a gypsy craft laden for a simpler life
We’d found our own place to dream
saw the naked sun step down to play
to dance on daisy-strewn fields
leaving us to lay by a twisting stream
cradled by heavy blossom trees
unable to face an unpalatable truth
The holes it burned in our maudlin minds
like never-healing wounds
more vulnerable than the blossom
which fell into torrents below
So it is that a few fine April days
are quickly gone
They never presage a fine summer to come
© copyright David Francis Barker 2011
Unseasonal, I know, but those of us entrenched in the northern hemisphere might want to think of spring.
Ghazal?: ‘A picture of you’
A picture of you
you cupping daffodils in sacred space
this picture of you framed in sacred space
yes I’m dreaming of spring, of light, of warmth!
a new life together, our sacred space
we’ve returned like birds in hope of new life
preparing for love in lush sacred space
what peace there may be, let’s find it again
near where the lilies grow, their sacred space
here, walking free, he whispers words of love
so we join him to share his sacred space
© copyright David Francis Barker 2011
*This has been work in progress for many months, but like all poetry I now abandon it, at least in this form.
Whether it can still be called a ghazal, I’m not sure. The last verse originally had a full reference to me, but I changed it to the third person and left it as the phrase ‘walking free’, which is a weak link to Francis, my middle name, which could mean ‘free man’, or perhaps, ‘little Frenchman’! Anyway, the original idea was to imagine Saint Francis in a garden with the birds but I guess it has morphed now into a romantic wish with hints of Francis walking somewhere in a beautiful garden, which might well be a nice place to be.
The painting (or a part of it) is my take, an impression if you will, of Monet and his water lilies, mixed media on canvas.
Ciscography 