Poems of Writer Barbara Smoker from
(Written in 1996 - eighty years after the Somme)
'When the boys come home from the front,' she said,
'I'll pick the one I wish to wed'
Forgetting, in her hazy head,
The eighty years her beaux lay dead.
For fifty years she'd lived alone,
With only cats to call her own,
And now she lived in a nursing-home,
Bereft of everything she'd known.
Her visitors look far too old
To be the people she is told.
Her face is blank, her heart is cold,
For lack of a hero's hand to hold.
At last, although no soldier-boy,
A cuddly new love brings her joy:
Her idle arm finds fresh employ,
To stroke her furry 'Felix' toy.
Barbara Smoker
With Conti-tours I strolled along
In glaring, Grecian, April heat,
When all at once I saw a throng,
A squirm of tadpoles at my feet.
Their puddle, shrinking fast away,
Could hardly last another day.
A few weeks since, in weather cool
And damp, some frogs their spawn had shot
Into the seeming perfect pool;
But soon the sun shone daily hot
And drained the water, arching gills ....
How far from Wordsworth's daffodils !
But like his number, roundly guessed,
Two thousand saw I at a glance,
The outer wriggles inward pressed,
Jerking their tails in frantic dance.
No creature there would ever know
How tadpoles into frogs may grow.
Now, oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bane of solitude;
And then black anguish fills my heart:
How life bids fair, but to depart.
Barbara Smoker 1968
Suppose God planned the perfect plan,
why let what Adam ate
destroy it all, for beast and man?
And why blame Eve, his mate?
Suppose the tree tabooed in Eden
bore no fruit at all,
so nothing sinful could be eaten
there would be no Fall.
Suppose that God's blue-printed Earth
were pristinely persistent,
there'd be no death, and hence no birth -
no you nor I existent.
Suppose that Genesis be true:
our global population
would have ever totalled two
had there been no temptation.
Suppose creationists prove wise
in swallowing the Fall -
what sort of God would victimise
all creatures, great and small?
Barbara Smoker
Opposing Hume's deterministic view,
Freewill for humankind did Kant infer
To justify God's ire when people err.
Which view is true? Has Hume or Kant won through?
While we may choose to do what we prefer,
We cannot choose what we prefer to do.
Living Relay
In this, the only world we know,as people come so people go.
Not one alive was living whenCharles Dickens held a restless pen,
yet, as a child, I met a man
who'd known him. Such a living span
takes only two: if six we link ...
then Shakespeare dips a quill in ink.
If twenty-one? Mohammed gives
to scribes a screed, through which he lives.
Choose thirty ... join the multitude
for which Christ Jesus conjures food;
on thirty-six, with Plato feast;
two more for sages of the East.
Count forty-three ... hear Homer tellthe Trojan tale he'd heard as well.
One hundred, say ... salute the day
when writing starts, with signs on clay.
Two thousand ... and we're face to face
with founders of the human race.
Yes, each has been and each has gone; yet ... each a torch has handed on.
This poem (probably the only one ever written with the aid of a calculator) won a prize in the Literary Review monthly competition, but has never appeared
Barbara Smoker
