Trinity
Scent of sweet woodsmoke
Beauty in indignation
Fresh ascetic breeze
Haiku and image © copyright df barker
Category: nature
Poem ‘The Californian’
The Californian
To this day I don’t know for sure
who you were.
You sounded American
and dressed like a Californian,
or that’s how it seemed
to my parochial mind.
I wasn’t used to your friendliness,
being spoken to so kindly
by a complete stranger,
but then, that was the thing —
I felt I knew you.
Why didn’t I ask your name?
The event had brought us together.
Now we waited for the train
to take us back through Cumbria’s
rounded hills, always threatened by rain.
And true to form, despite it being July,
we found ourselves sheltering
in a little cafe, sipping bad coffee
made more palatable with cream.
That’s where I saw you surfing
in my mind’s eye,
feeling that smelting sun sink
beyond an ocean of glass.
We had just enough time
to assess our few days
in the company of a Buddha.
At least that’s what we said, if I recall,
and that we, too, might be Bodhisattvas!
And who’s to say we weren’t right?
Even now, when I play that album,
I keep looking at the picture
of the kind-looking man, all smiles,
with the sweet and beaten guitar.
He still looks an awful lot like you
poem and image © copyright df barker 2012
Poem ‘The First Time’
The First Time
Blackbird, you must believe me,
but I didn’t set out to praise you.
So much can seem pastoral,
hackneyed, and plain ‘done already’.
But your song today
when I opened the window,
once the lashing rain had passed
and a feeble sun had come out –
it was so vital and clear.
You were not troubled by worry,
not hamstrung with minutiae,
nor at all concerned about
what you should be doing.
You simply sang from your heart,
a heart which I can’t always find
or even acknowledge in me.
Today then, at least let me say
it was like hearing you
for the first time.
Which of course, I was
Poem © copyright df barker
Poem ‘A Robin’s Descent’
A Robin’s Descent
The rain is gone,
though a heaviness remains.
Between this precious repose
and first glimpses of a lighter day,
a robin drops to drenched grass,
almost tame and curious,
the colour of passion,
his peppy, ardent life
among manifold greens.
Then he pops up once more,
daring closer this time,
an upturned table leg his perch,
to peek inside this house
of false comfort,
bringing life to worn out lives
poem and image © copyright df barker 2012
Poem ‘Barricades’
Barricades
My home is a castle in need, because
of who I am, for all that went before.
Living close to a sea I rarely saw,
I rode bikes, losing trees, clothes on the way,
all scale of self to glimpse some grey ocean,
a lone redshank wail from his muddy creek
and rise into blanket skies, scorning me.
I didn’t know then, nor do I pretend
to know now exactly what’s hurting me,
but the funk of youth is bitterness now.
The shining ship which might’ve saved me, white
sails riding threshold waves — it didn’t come.
Abandoned, the sailor who never was,
behind terse barricades, counting the days
poem © copyright df barker 2012
*image © Neil Smith
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