SENTINEL POETRY #26 Online Magazine Monthly, January 2005 |
BEN BARTON Home Time Leaving
town on a 711, returning ‘home’ to where I’m forgotten.
Anonymous faces: prams and cars spell fresh opportunities – but
nothing is the same Girls pull on cigarettes in a
dusky corner boys jostle on the patchy
green And I’m the grown up,
yet all alone. I used to dream of returning
here; pulling aside this house in a
shiny convertible not a Stagecoach bus although the throne
isn’t important I know what is – you
don’t live here anymore Scared to ask and too tired
to knock – instead I swing on the empty frame,
toes skipping the tarmac The roundabout removed, just
a concrete square Health and safety no doubt In my mind, I’m still
that child, running and wheezing, the
asthma attack still lingers, like the cold
marsh air Careless phantoms, haunting
my memories tackling insecurity – and
leaving me bare. Ben Barton works as a writer for
Saga Holidays Ltd. He has been publishing poetry for eight
years in a variety of publications, including: Acorn, Isibongo, Linkway, New
Horizon, Panda, Poetry Greece, Roadworks, Scriptor, Springboard, The Poetry
Church, Taoism and Poetry and Time Haiku. In 1997 aged fifteen he won first
prize in the Ottakars/Faber & Faber poetry competition for National
Poetry Day (teen category) in his home county of Kent. The following year his
poem The Re-Birth Remembered repeated this success by winning the competition
again. The poem was also a winner in the National competition and was
published in the accompanying anthology. |