City Nights
Though your faces
change these same streets
remain. Same high
sights in floodlit stone,
city nights abased
by brawls and chilli fights
in queues
Where were you when
I was this green
and victim?
Your fashion is the masque
of fools, disguises nothing;
your life like mine is
still waste
But somehow you’re
preoccupied.
Laugh in my face and deride
my reticence— won’t you!
So it always
was, for soon the dreaming
is done
© copyright df barker 2012
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
Sea Wall
Stand and look from here,
you can see the earth’s curve,
a sea-levelled land
bereft of its mother.
Shells we have found
while the silt blew away,
powdered by droughts
and the pitiless wind.
Stand here with me
at the high spring tide—
you know the stark sea
will swell all over this again
poem © copyright df barker 2012
Ways Out
During those darker days
while Dad dug the earth,
I would stand with him
and dream of the sky,
that it might send an angel
in a shining silver disk
to whisk me away
to some fantastic world,
as far away as possible
from that featureless place
Once my dreams were done
each mournful Sunday night,
that was when I’d watch him
sitting hunched before
his old bespoke radios,
yellow fingers twisting knobs
while turning his ear
to strange sideband sounds,
smirking to Southern drawl charm
engaging cool Transvaal
I knew it was his way out,
released and briefly lost
among the wild waves,
bringing some colour to his world
before I’d hear the clock wind up,
the curtains being drawn
poem and image © copyright df barker 2012
Chances
You watch me do the washing up,
clean surfaces and toilets.
All the time you’re standing there,
moaning, swaying in your underwear,
sleepily spooning chocolate cereal
into that stale and coated mouth.
You must look at me and think
this will never be you,
that someone will always be here
to do this, the menial things,
the responsible things.
Maybe in twenty years
your swelling salary
will provide the foreign cleaner,
so you and some lover
can roam that glittering world.
Maybe sooner than that;
this huge lottery win
you keep hankering for
will surely drop the easy life
straight into your lazy lap.
Chances are, it won’t.
Do you still want to know
what the future might hold?
Take a look at me.
poem © copyright df barker 2012
Ciscography 