Dark
Rook on the road verge ahead
how casually you’ll step aside,
only just avoid my wheels.
Is that why I smile at the mirror
where you promptly step back
to continue to pick and prod,
pulling at the roadkill entrails
some straitjacket driver provides?
Like the crow, the raven— few
are as bright as you, so dark
in colour and reputation
poem and image © copyright dfbarker 2012
Weapon Take
No rusty blade
ever turns up here,
no shadow of a ship
or bejewelled belt;
no iconic helm
to add credence
to our wounded identity.
Not even signs
of a mystery hillock
rising in hugging mists
to excite or intrigue
those metal detector men.
Merely one vast industrial
scar, scoured of feature,
almost of life, tamed,
or destroyed,
depending on your view,
turned inside out
by Angevin priors
and inscrutable Dutchmen.
I come from a long
line of diggers
and dark-eyed women,
grown out of this morass,
hardened to sweat
and pitiless Ural winds.
People who made-do,
though never in
any doubt they
were the subjected
men of their Hundred,
the brave new Wapentake,
where the councillors
still speak in a
double-Dutch behind
tall, timbered walls.
poem and image © copyright dfbarker 2012
*poem first published in collection ‘Anonymous Lines’, available at amazon.
** Wapentake was the Danish word for the English Hundred (a small, political unit, originally meaning a hundred homes). This word is still used in the ‘Danelaw’ counties of eastern England.
Brief
Of the class of ’77
to my mind you were the best
Diamond moments
in empty halls,
instruments lying at your mercy,
each note, every chord
an affable smile
pavilioned in memory
How could you
be so brief,
this grief be so long?
image and poem © copyright dfbarker 2012
Think of me
please pay your respects
to the dust trodden into carpets,
ingrained in chairs
and in curtains,
all along these tired window ledges
Then will you write my name
on the dusty shelves
where my books used to lie?
For in truth
they were more surely me
image and poem © copyright dfbarker 2012
Underground
By night the town paints clandestine shapes,
broach spires pierce a black arras
and decorated naves of Barnack rag
drape like sepia backcloths for ghosts
and revellers who may pass unaware
on equal terms, merely inches
yet centuries above charcoal rivers
channelled underground,
flushing silently till the night
draws out heat
and chatter of day
Streets swarm with strangers now,
unspeaking shadows in recesses
cupping whispers of gamy tongues,
smoking pipes like brittle bones
with fresh memories of tides
and the deep keeled boats
dragged up onto gravel headlands
by gangs of gruff rovers
and rippling Thracian soldiers
from legions awake to chance,
their unwrested sin
poem and image © copyright dfbarker 2012
Ciscography 