Poem ‘Silent Wings’

Silent Wings

Looking up into darkness
he asks if that smudge is Andromeda.
She thinks it may be.
He’s heard its light takes
two million years to reach his eyes,
stories on swift silent wings;
galaxies so far away,
so near at hand
like froth spinning round
in her coffee cup.
‘I’ll go there one day,’ he says
‘Why not go right now?’
she asks – ‘in your mind!’
He looks up once again
his mind big like the light-filled sky,
recalling her story of Horus
crossing millions of years

© copyright David Francis Barker 2011

*illustration done wholly digitally

Poem: ‘Winter Sun’

Winter Sun

The weaker sun burns low
over stilled marsh and scrape.

Straight-cut dykes glow like
hot metal fissures through indigo.

Heavy boots crunch on ghosted grass,
breaking threats of enveloping silence.

By a glistening gate I pause, to gaze,
the pristine kiss of rime stiffens my hand.

The lone motion is my breath, brief clouds
vanishing in vasty air, to which I am inured.

A bleeding horizon yields dwarfed
silhouettes feigning heat, random skeletal

trees and pylons merely punctuate
before a distant church stump.

A sudden snipe breaks his cover,
rasping furiously over my head,

where I catch fleet Mercury gleaming
bright through icy blue.

© copyright David Francis Barker 2011

* Taken from poetry collection ‘Anonymous Lines’, which can be found here: http://liten.be//nr7n9

** The illustration is from a current painting by the poet/artist, showing the marshland at winter sunset near Boston in Lincolnshire, England.