Barry Middleton Poems

On a Florida summer afternoon,
I try to bring inside the heat
of soupy air I work through tired lungs.
My air is a studied breath,
...

A few miles south of Eden,
I wandered the primordial garden
in the land of Confederate Trillium,
the now endangered bloom
...

I cannot find the anger
I am crushed by the sadness
another senseless shooting in America
another bombing in a far off land
...

Despair has built for me a wall,
foundations laid upon the past,
till block on block it was complete,
and high and strong and built to last.
...

the summer heat has gone
rebuked by autumn's dawn

and copper colored leaves
...

Stealing away to a distant field,
hidden far from the lights of town,
we lay in the grass on a secret night,
watching the Perseids shower down.
...

I heard a mother weep again;
her son lay dying in the street.
And does it matter how he died,
or who it was that held the gun?
...

I smell the rain again
for everything in nature
gives a warning
...

Day after day we read the poetry
of the glitterati and the novice,
who pen meaningless metaphors
to incarcerate endless nonsense.
...

I know that knock upon my door.
Her ghost appears each New Year's Eve.
We never find just what to say,
for time and destiny are mute.
...