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
Little Anne
How could it have a name,
this skeleton dug up in York?
I asked myself many times,
sitting there transfixed by the image –
a face with no flesh
in the open newspaper on the floor.
In the background
the Righteous Brothers sang,
requiem voices reverberating.
A lone, leaden bass
dripping in a sad, grey pool.
I stared at those empty sockets
as if I had known her,
unsure if I was mortal, too.
On the black and white T.V.
they were burying Churchill.
From the kitchen mother’s
caveats decried the great man,
how she’d marched into
the polling booth back
in forty five dressed all in red!
But when I asked her what
a Jewess was, she wouldn’t say.
All I wanted to know was how
Anne had ended up like this,
disturbed in her rest
while Churchill went to his.
poem © copyright df barker 2012
*first published in poetry collection ‘Anonymous Lines’, available at amazon
* PLEASE ALSO SEE http://mikemalonemysteries.wordpress.com/
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
In past I dwell as I feel lost,
through lanes of memories I go
away from all that is the now.
With much, too much forgotten pain
my place is in the cellar of my mind.
I now am archivist who works
in underground and moldy rooms
where daylight never comes to me.
I place the files on rolling shelves.
Don’t try to find me, this is home a while.
