Family strangers
Youngest — I am odd one out
Mission accomplished
Hurled into this mad, mad world
Did I really choose this fate?
Copyright Francis 2020
*Poetics dVerse.
Travelling in the Wilderness (Tanka)
Category: dVerse
Trekkie Addict (Quadrille)
In another dimension
a science fiction buff
might be prized.
Both generations of Star Trek,
scripts known verbatim,
dramas wrought
from billions
and parsecs,
all sheer make-believe:
I cannot abide it.
So which side is up in space?
I’m passed the Van Allen belts
Copyright Francis 2020
dVerse — Quadrille 117 — The Dude Abides
I am a bit of a Trekkie addict — but is it absurd?
Epsilon
everlasting great spirit,
eden descends from the sky,
emigrants meek and righteous,
equality’s fantasy
ending discrimination;
evacuation no more —
evil routed through the stars
Copyright Francis 2020
Haibun: ‘Isabella’
The sea was writhing at Seahouses. Northumbria wild, voices calling on the wind blown from Hyperborean reaches.
And then you — your skin grey like a seal, matching your eyes, a lantern jaw jutting out like a promontory, unyielding.
So then why are you so kind? Because you are blind, like nature, the tempestuous oceans thrusting, reaching, for just one fleeting sight of your son.
Who brought me this far?
Providence cannot explain
Winter’s existence
Copyright Francis 2020
Complementary (Tentative Diagnosis of Synesthesia)
Dragon on vert
poppy resonance dancing
Tuesday shimmering, bleeding
blood-high on grass smoking
in Cambrian mountains
or Vietnam
through Afghanistan’s
fields’ perfumery
stains on reverse strata
of Snowdon’s peak, or Cambodia
covered in skulls
stacked dens of white hopium
masquerading as lines of snow
conquerors’ castles
morsels of stone
demolishing molars
of the starving
in unbearable agony
— Boudica still scowling, raging,
deafening blue woad on faces
bearing banners
golden torque cast
crushed under studded caligae
mass burials’ deep turf
dredging bone from mud
Sixties’ grass, love child
in fifty shades
acid ancestors calling
thudding on our spine “wake up!”
their history burned —
your future denied
Stand firm in dissolution
on Sunday’s black evening
Copyright Francis Barker 2020
The Elloe Recorder 