There is no love on those horizon lines,
nor in the sight of ships
tacking their finite courses to
oblivion, spilling me
outside.
So who is it waiting
in the rain, feels its spots
cool on their skin, can smell
its sweet aroma
off the hard hot road, stretching away
around the lonely coast?
poem and picture © copyright David F. Barker 2012
It was you who said that
it’s not what you earn but
how little you need. That
was the way to fly
in their face— living
within your means
is no good to them. They
want your soul, your very
soul, make it drown
in debt and fed
on all the salt
and fat
and lies you can swallow.
And they want you bound
to their state, you said,
their secret,
silent state. Well, I don’t
know about that, but
your answer was simple, a firm riposte
which said ‘no’. It meant
watching the pennies
and paying your dues. Keeping it
simple,
not listening
to the news
poem © copyright David F. Barker 2012
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
Anne Boleyn? Hans Holbein the Younger [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
(a response to Holbein’s sketch,
purportedly of Anne Boleyn)
So, is this really you? Those full lips
well kissed, I have no doubt,
your pretty duckys hidden, fit for ravagers
we call kings. Holbein’s profile, it
simply shines your intelligence, courts
with language, love and ideas,
perhaps a little too much for kings
and enemies to take, at a time
when your sex are meant to be
little more than slaves and vessels
for petulant princes.
But no one can stop me grieving:
I imagine you blink, turn
and smile at me. Oh,
you are strong and keen, yet tender
and kind like all mothers
and lovers should be. No wonder
other men may have dreamed
on those lips, carried away
by your verve, which only victors
ever get to call treason. Now I wish
I could touch your fine chin
and whisper: “Elizabeth—
remember Elizabeth!” My words
vanish into air like justice, while you
stare blankly through Traitor’s Gate;
but this little girl takes the better part
of you, better than any king before
or since, of this abject state
poem © copyright David F. Barker
“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” Matthew 13:12
His wish was for eternity, flesh
of the sun to mask his corruption; yet
he got his wish the instant Carter’s
torch shone through that chiseled hole: An afterlife
lived only through posterity, outshining
his ignominious end, all
made possible by legions of lackeys who worked
and then died.
Fast forward the centuries
and see little has changed, though
the flesh of the gods
is in bars, hidden in vaults underground, never
seen— like the hopes and dreams of peace,
these rigged scales of elusive justice. We are
left to scrap and save what we can
in a manufactured, finite
world, this theatre underfoot
none like us shall inherit. There is, after all,
only one sun in the sky
and Osiris lies in pieces, unable
to be mended again
© copyright Davidi F. Barker 2012
Ciscography 