More information on Andrew Barnes' poetry will follow soon

Meanwhile...

Poem of the month- October

Autumn is upon us....  This month's poem was first published in Solihull Sonnets- an anthology published by Solihull Libraries. 

 

 

Brueton park

 

Where once we walked in summer's golden fine,

to spy heron perch upon Blythe branches,

over water, still ripples, slow-combined,

dragonflies bold in squadron-rank tranches,

 

now linking arms we stroll into false time,

along the path towards a fading sun,

age in a duffle coat shambling behind,

future too certain, our ending begun.

 

I still seek out hope in nature's surrounds,

this parkland cycle of managed life and death,

each spring with new life brings insight profound,

winter aches ice and a shortening breath.

 

Once we loved this place for freedom and hope,

now it holds a solace helping elders cope.

                                      

                                                              © Andrew Barnes

 

Poetry Salzburg 

My poem 'Planning and architecture' has been accepted for publication in issue 43 of Poetry Salzburg review due out Autumn 2025.

Obsessed with Pipework 

Pleased to announce that my poem  'Saltwater' has been published in issue 111 (August 2025) of 'Obsessed with Pipework' magazine. Individual copies of OWP are £4.50 and four issue subscriptions £15. Orders and cheques to Flarestack publishing owpeditors@outlook.com 33 Gartons Mead, Evercreech, Somerset BA46HJ

 

Pushing out the boat

My poem 'States of mind' is featured in issue 18 of 'Pushing out the boat' magazine-  launched on Sunday 18th May 2025.

Many thanks to all involved!  See link below

https://www.pushingouttheboat.co.uk/issue-18/

Dark Poets club

My poem 'Butterfly' is featured on the Dark Poets club website. See link below:

https://www.darkpoets.club/post/butterfly

A couple of videos

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19pu3ZEcFs/

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1HzXvgBuuA/

 

Archive

Apollo

We queued for an hour to file past,

little me clinging to my Dad's arm.

Up close the spacecraft appeared

to be largely tin foil and rubber bands.

 

To say we'd seen this iconic machine 

appealed to my father's inner engineer,

to my mind's explosion of toy rockets,

but it was less, and more, than imagined.

 

In the long line we had shuffled

by space rock in glass cabinets,

read of tiny meteors,

learned about weightlessness,

 

imagined the pressured confines 

of the Lunar Landing Module,

gleaned that the name was for the God

of prophecy, poetry, the sun and light.

 

Universal wonders embraced,

the vastness of space and our tiny planet,

mankind's ingenuity before us,

the bravery of the human spirit,

 

and yet by the end of our mission

neither of us could really believe

that men had orbited the moon,

in an upturned bucket, a flimsy egg-shell.

 

 

Not about Portmeirion

 

I long for hotels,

their anonymous freedom,

a sense of occasion,

being elsewhere,

to be in a city, and just be there,

lost, every turning a minor discovery.

But instead I’m here in the country.

 

I write up notes as if this place

had a real history,

as if Brian Epstein once stayed

in the room above the gatehouse

(which apparently he did),

as if anyone who wasn’t a guest

would ever read them.

 

I sit by the water, looking out across

the false scale of the colonnade.

It would be easy to imagine myself in Venice,

or some part of London that looks like Venice,

or the piece of Wales that was designed

to resemble the part of London

that looks like Venice.

 

But actually I’m not here at all.

My mind has wandered away

like a novice monk

who must practice his meditation,

introducing the mantra to gently replace thought,

to focus on the eyes of the statue of Buddha

that sits up above me on the trellis hill.

 

It’s a painstaking observance,

a ritual repeated daily,

but it has no depth of meaning,

it’s all top notes, there for show,

like the concrete boat

that sits, unsinkable 

in the estuary. 

 

A kind of archive

 

On Kawara's exhibition

of precise date paintings-

 

four coats of smooth, black acrylic on each canvas,

perfect white signwriter's text

repeatedly pin-points the day of creation.

I notice he produced two pieces

on my thirty-fifth birthday.

 

Feeling extraordinarily honoured

I carefully ring the date of my visit

in a diary, with thick black ink,

and begin to count the days elapsed

since I last attended

 

On Kawara's exhibition

of precise date paintings-

 

sanded down to a new blackboard finish,

lettered with set square, protractor and plumb-bob,

dust picked out on the point of a brush.

I wonder why he chose to paint

exclusively on Sundays.

 

Convert to numerology,

I search with fever through religious scripts

for enigma, the I Ching, a bible code,

hoping to spot the sequence

that will predict my next appearance at

 

On Kawara's exhibition

of precise date paintings.

 

 Thomas Aquinas**

 

Patients have been moved to the basement,

oxygen supplies are running low.

This hospital is claimed as a military target,

the doctors marked as traitors and terrorists.

 

Women and children scrabbling for trains

as refugees, their men forced to remain and fight.

At night the darkness splits in spitting fire,

cluster bombs, missiles raging into the blocks.

 

And what hell is in the shelters, the cellars,

the stench of fractured foul pipes,

overridden by the close sweat of a six day fear,

by humanity draining, seeping into stone.

 

Imagine your mother weeping in that corner, 

flinching continually at the percussion shells,

your little brother crying with hunger,

your sister's eyes glazed by what she has seen.

 

Next door a baby is dying slowly, lungs charring

with each inhalation of phosphor bomb breath,

cradled by a surrogate, a young girl, whose helpless 

wailing you hear deep into the night. 

 

There are no 'just' wars, there is just war,

We could be in Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq

Afghanistan, Palestine, Ireland, Beirut

the London blitz, Dresden, Paschendaele…

 

Blood is the same, grief is the same,

men of power demanding allegiance to a flag,

a regime, a construct, and always the poor, 

foot soldiers, infantry, collateral damage.

 

Nothing new here, it's all been said before,

and that's the real terror, our leaders cannot learn,

bullets, bombs, bleeding gut wounds repeated

over and over, until we can't feel anything.

 

And then suddenly the burst above our heads,

the downdraft, the breath sucked from the air,

frail bodies preparing to die,

holding a last second on this earth.

 

** 13th century philosopher/ theologian who first clearly developed the concept and definition of a 'just war'.         

 

                                   

© Andrew Barnes

 

Editorial credits: Lunar poetry, MAC arts, Kumquat website, The Cannon's Mouth