Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. PREVIOUS TOP TEN TUESDAY TOPICS: August 18: Books that Should be Adapted […]
Top Ten Tuesday: Halloween Freebie — The Book Lovers’ Sanctuary
When I was a boy there was no Halloween.
We knocked on doors for a ‘Penny for the Guy’
to buy bangers and rockets
and set them off where we liked,
young boys running amok
along twilight roads
through those endless stubble fields
under watching skies.
But then someone opened that box
and the spirits escaped;
the warped tales of our history
replaced by phantoms of trick and treat –
in an age of deceit.
copyright Francis Barker 2019
Today marks 502 years since the German monk, Martin Luther, one of the prime movers in the Reformation of Christianity, apparently nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg church of All Saints.
In those days the Electorate of Saxony, in which the city of Wittenberg lay, was part of the sprawling Holy Roman Empire, of which, what we now know as Germany, was wholly contained, though it was not a unified country but a hotchpotch collection of smaller states and city states.
Martin Luther, who had long agonised about his own faith, was dismayed by the growing sale of indulgences, and especially the spread of this practice to his homeland of Germany.
For a tidy sum, an indulgence could reduce or cancel your time in purgatory. The funds from the sale of indulgences were to be used for the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
This may have been the final straw which led Luther to publicly portray his strong misgivings about the religion in which he was so deeply immersed.
The stone which Martin Luther dropped into the lake of faith that day has continued to ripple ever since – an action which was demonstrably epoch making.
copyright Francis Barker 2019
copyright Francis Barker 2019
October comes and suddenly
there’s too much change.
Enough already with trees going bare,
without having to alter clocks
to appease the North
which might not even care.
While some see beauty in decay,
all I find is a reckoning, revenge
in Hallowe’en’s red-eyed stare,
where we fare no better than pigs
fattened and slaughtered,
sentenced for nothing
by callous clowns in wigs.
So I will kick through the leaves,
as is the custom
in my search for a soul,
or a silver-lining in death,
wrapped up like a sausage
against the first icy blast
which blows away all joy
and steals the breath.
© copyright David F. Barker 2012
*First published in poetry collection ‘Anonymous Lines’, Night Publishing, available at amazon.
Ciscography 