Life giver to all
You are not the creator
A mystery still
Copyright Francis Barker 2020
Haiku: The Sun
Tag: heat
Haiku: Heat
In oppressive heat
Each movement is difficult
Wishing for the storm
Copyright Francis Barker 2020
Too Many Faces
They call it intoxicating. Spices full
on humidity, shrinking circles of heat run
down the small of my back, diesel
drips in sweat, salt on my lips— so
why do lungs full of carcinogens
feel like a relief? In the end you tire
of the faces, always staring, smiling
all the time like marigold hearts
worn on loose sleeves. Not so much
an assault on senses as an attack
on my sanity; overindulgence
in samsara. No wonder, then, this
belief in rebirth, endless circles of pain
to match this growing pain in my head:
There are, after all, only so many faces
to go round
© copyright David F. Barker 2012
Peterborough, England, BST
Poem ‘Clam’
Clam
He didn’t know how to handle it, the sheer
heat of Crete; nor
the first sight of her, bikini pink, and later
sauntering around carefree
in even less,
through the clam of every evening.
And he’d certainly never seen
a cockroach before. It scooted up
their wall, brazen and antennae led—
she leapt straight out of bed! But
this one hadn’t counted on
the soul of a size eleven shoe.
While she drew a star in her diary, he
flung open the windows
each sultry morning, looked out
across the milky Mirabello Bay,
then down below, where
right on queue, Adonis
hosed down the tacky taverna floor,
leaving him to remember
what was cold and rain
© copyright David F. Barker 2012
Poem ‘Heat’
Heat
When stepping off the ship, heat
hit him,
something heavy and palpable, his duty drawn
out into an exile
stuffing the bank accounts
of far-off millionaires, stuffing
him and the natives from Melbourne
to Manitoba.
Such a relief to be on the train,
officers hankering in rigid
silence for the cool heights of Shimla,
Home Counties in miniature once bleeding
the big world dry, where spinsters
of Little England began to
watch their gingham fade
He favoured his mother’s
side, whose pale skin and eyes were
more fondly remembered
than appreciated, now more than
a world away,
spattered freckles on his face
where the sweat ran
free in that searing carriage;
sights of displaced women
wrapping up in their shawls, children
standing and sitting, staring
and sleeping, heading on to homes they’d
never seen (or ever see), leaving him
to watch the scorched earth slide
by like some weary sentence,
his mind hanging on
to the boney cattle half
hidden in mud, in the channels
of sometime rivers
gaping for monsoon
poem © copyright df barker 2012
