Haiku: The Waiting Game
Photo by Pixabay, http://www.pexels.com
Sitting on our hands
Waiting for the clouds to clear
How long must we wait?
copyright Francis Barker 2019
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clouds
Sitting on our hands
Poem ‘Flux’
The window is
ajar,
just enough to
let in some air, to
tantalise the cat
hooked by
night’s soft invitation.
Something outside
is burning, hangs
in the yielding light, though
I’ve never
seen those crimson clouds
phase
to dusky pink
and then to grey.
It’s a flux which
eludes me
every time.
Magic, you might say,
like being in space,
and now
© copyright David F. Barker 2012
Poem: ‘August in Yesteryear’
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Summer was once ices poles and living
on bikes; we were free like swifts
screaming circles in the air. Greens
were for football and teams twenty a side,
roads for playing cricket, where cars
were stalling aberrations. We lay
on lawns watching clouds, minds unfettered
in those zenith blues; guilt
and care belonged to
some other world and school
might well have been
beyond the moon.
Only later came guitars with boys’ awakenings;
serenading neighbours
sunbathing in the yard, or the shock
of full moons rising late in the day. We really
thought we had credence, like southern
Skynyrd boys, singing in that
sultry heat with school coming at us
like banks of cloud, the football season
begun and cricket nearing its end,
watching shadows gathering
where the sun once shone
poem © copyright David F. Barker 2012
Poem ‘Subliminal’
Subliminal
They put it up on billboards.
It made the headlines,
the tickers scrolling in Times Square
and TV screens back home.
It was like hearsay going viral,
became banal talking points
in satellite drivel,
a tsunami of information
which hid the pearl of truth.
This notion that everyone
who has ever lived
could be alive again today,
our eight billions souls
matching totals for the past;
all of us primed, exposed
for some terrible judgement.
How many saw the subliminal flash,
I’m not sure;
reputedly like an ad,
the split second image of cola
that wets your thirst,
though not on screens – in the sky.
A judgement? No ceremony, no glitz,
no alarming lord riding the clouds.
But word quickly got around,
between lines of copy,
in the things not said.
Tickers in Times Square
stuttered, then stopped;
people draining away
like water down plug holes.
Wi-fi was gone,
it’s just something else
we can’t grasp in the air.
The only tickers now
are the clocks, our watches,
while we keep one eye
on the sky
poem and image © copyright df barker 2012
Poem ‘Adventus’
Adventus
I wake up
and the world has changed
there’s a strange quality to the light,
lurid colours of the sky creating
anthropomorphic shapes in clouds,
warnings weaved through vapour trails
like a painting by Roerich
I hear the blackbird
he’s singing a new song,
displaced by the cunning air
in an odd synchronicity
which cavorts with my mind,
a nameless advent
a voice in my head
says to ignore the news,
make a lover of the duvet
and I resolve play Vaughan Williams
around the clock,
cry out my heart to his glorious fifth
till that sweet second
to midnight comes
poem and image © copyright dfbarker 2012
abstract image created digitally.
