The wind strikes once more,
he’s tossing washing lines
and turning trees,
threatens to strip the ripe colour
which makes the season tolerable.
I wonder what’s made him so fierce:
He’s giving me glimpses of winter,
the lockdowns imposed,
when stepping outside
becomes a crime, where
the only feature will be the trash
blown starkly down our street
Copyright Francis Barker 2020
*We may have to find new ways to entertain ourselves this winter.
copyright Francis Barker 2020
copyright Francis Barker 2020
copyright Leofwine Tanner 2019
copyright Leofwine Tanner 2019 and 2011
Hanging in the sun
A breeze is my companion
Elemental friends
Leofwine Tanner 2019
Bede
It wasn’t at Jarrow where I sensed you
but on Bamburgh’s raging shore,
among the seaweed and razor shells
on gull peppered sands,
its castle brooding behind me
like a huge chiseled tomb.
North waves were scrambling,
spilling memories of guttural voices
disguised in flushing sound;
cries of songs, harps and old tales lost,
fragments I could almost hear
when I turned my head into the wind.
And who was the black figure
bent against the breeze,
absorbing sharp light
on that blinding beach?
I struggled through the dunes,
the little islands of sparse grass
and pygmy flowers —
but you were gone,
extant only in memory,
my boundless imagination,
and in your books
which carry me through centuries
on a primal wave,
each time I read your words
Poem and image © 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
Beachcombing
We set out one morning
after the rain had cleared.
Not a breath of wind,
loose clothes sticking to my skin.
Our intention was to search
the shallow beach,
stretching so far ahead of us
towards lights on low, murky cliffs—
baleful beacons through the mist.
“Stop there!” you said
and took that picture of me,
my trousers rolled up;
never the most fetching sight.
“Walking on water,” that’s
what you called it right away:
Maybe this was the closest
we ever got to heaven
poem and image © copyright df barker 2012
Trinity
Scent of sweet woodsmoke
Beauty in indignation
Fresh ascetic breeze
Haiku and image © copyright df barker
Mrs Wright
We approached her, standing stiffly
outside her cottage on the corner,
while she tended those remaining roses.
The sun was in his fall
with Michaelmas giving way to cooler winds.
She turned with some difficulty,
but still greeted us with a bespectacled smile.
She always had time, especially for me
and her roses, her world seeming slow
and certain, just like the green bus
we caught that hour on the bridge.
By the time we got back,
tired and ladened with groceries,
the sun was still out, sinking intensely
over the evergreen cemetery.
We saw no sign of the ambulance,
or the policeman’s bicycle.
Not even her son’s hastily parked car.
There was only a flutter
in the curtains across the road
as we struggled on by.
Such had been her last afternoon
upon which we had paused.
We hurried home having no idea,
doing up our light coats
in the stiffening breeze.
poem © copyright df barker 2012, first published in poetry collection ‘Anonymous Lines’, available digitally at amazon.co.uk and amazon.com (latter for the book itself).
