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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2004 : Pamela G. Barnes
SIXTY-TWO HAIKUS ON WORLD WAR II
A Memoir of a six-year-old London evacuee
Geese in formation
Fly into a red sun
Lancasters returning empty
#
Spirals of white lightning
Tear into the blue sky -
Dogfighters hurl teeth of steel
#
Luftwaffe bombers attacking!
Enemy earthquakes
With no Richter scale
#
Every night a screaming siren:
Scramble down the shelter
Teddy, Bunny or Dolly this time?
#
Bombs rock the dug-out
"Please, granny, PLEASE
Show me how to cast on"
#
Grandad fought the Zulus
In the Boer War
Spear-scars dent his forehead
#
Climbing from the dug-out
Onto father's shoulder
A crimson sky of blazing phosphor
#
Next door a direct hit.
Their Anderson shelter
A twenty-foot hole
#
Piled bricks - no walls
Black beams - no roofs
A wren makes her nest
#
Searching for shrapnel
"Fabriken im Deutschland"
Worth two blood marbles
#
Asphyxiating smelly rubber
Gas mask a black-boxed
Permanent companion
#
Dropped in the dugout
Dolly's two eyes roll out
"Hitler's killed my Bessie!"
#
Thirty Messerschmitts roar overhead
Spits and Hurricanes strike
Twenty-one fly back out
#
After the air raid
Father eats no dinner
A head rolled past him
#
Crisscross vapor trails
Cram a hot blue sky
Chasing Spitfires and Stukas
#
"Never has so much
Been owed to so few"
Mr. Churchill's finest hour
#
Father is an engineer
Inventing tools that make the parts
For Hawker and De Haviland
#
A medal for uncle
Dodging enemy bullets
Nothing for us getting bombed
#
Auntie Ethel and an airman
Slept together in her bed
"Shush child, shut your mouth"
#
Sprawling wildflowers
Over blackened rubble
Blue, white, and red
#
Father went to Dunkirk
In his little boat alongside two
Hundred thousand other sitting ducks
#
The Nazi monster has a face
We laugh at dreadful names
Hitler, Himmler, Hirohito, Hess
#
Christmas jigsaw pictures
Dorniers strafe carriers
U-Boats torpedo supply ships
#
A Heinkel of balsa wood,
Tissue paper, and varnish.
My brother bombs it
#
When his tummy's pressed
My new orange Teddy
Plays 'The Lakes of Killarny'
#
Mother shops with little squares
Cut from our ration books
One egg each a week
#
Potato powder, milk
Powder and egg powder
Make our fake-fake-fake food
#
Victory garden spuds
Cabbages and carrots
Among the air-raid bunkers
#
Uncle Freddy lost his rifle
Dropped his cap in the frying pan
Got six-months potato peeling
#
Aunt makes shells in a factory
Wearing slacks and turban
Lights her cigarette with a bullet
#
The Luftwaffe bombed the home
Of the King and Queen
Will they live in a Nissan hut too?
#
On the train swarms of children
Labeled like luggage wave goodbye,
Destination unknown
#
Ordered by Government decree
To a slate mine village in Wales
Beaten daily at the dame school
#
A vicious rooster, dead sheep,
Oil lamps and stinky outhouse,
Candles up the shadowy staircase
#
Bleak cold slate mountains
Black rainy skies
Lonely and sick now will I die?
#
Back home, barrage balloons
Searchlights, ack-ack fire,
Squads of waving POWs
#
Uncle Bob went to Burma
To fight the Japanese
The Long March killed him
#
Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose
Talk to us on the radio
"Children, this is the time be very brave"
#
Toytown on Children's Hour
Larry the Lamb, Dennis the Dachshund
Smarmy Lord Haw-Haw on the news
#
Itma with Tommy Handley
Round the Horne with Larry Adier
We'll meet again with Vera Lyn
#
Malta: defended by Faith,
Hope, Charity, and Uncle Sid
Brought me home a dried seahorse
#
Big Yankidoods are here!
All drawly talk and gleaming badges
"Hey! Got 'ny gum chum?"
#
Steak for dinner
Of whale meat
Never again
#
Out of a leaden sky
The doodle-bug's rattling stops
Falling silence.....
#
A shunting steam train in the station
A shrill departure whistle
"Ma, send me cards with fairies on!"
#
Paddington, Basingstoke,
Kidderminster, Leominster,
Shrewsbury, Ludlow, boarding school
#
Spoonfuls of morning Virol
For sweeties, only licorice bootlace
And locust beans to suck
#
Potatoes, bread, and jam
Jam, potatoes, bread.
Nothing else to eat
#
A dining room engraving
Of captured Marie Antoinette
"Manners, girls, elbows off"
#
Dreams of peacetime
Huge pineapples, bananas
And endless chocolate bars
#
Cross-legged in the Blue Room
Sewing samplers by the fire
Stifling a thousand hungers
#
The doctor's fingers gravely
Pinch my swollen belly.
"It's malnutrition"
#
A necessary medicine
Almost unobtainable
Enviable beef broth
#
Our crocodile of tartan kilts
White gloves and panama hats
The pealing of Saint Laurence bells
#
The 'Feathers' Tudor Hotel'
Standing in cobbled streets
King Henry VIII slept here
#
Sewing scraps of fabric
To make a tiny teddy bear
Fitting a matchbox bed
#
Winter walks through beechnut trees
Up the hill to Ludlow castle
Swans drift by below
#
An unexploded bomb
In the vicar's garden
Sixpence a visit
#
Summer days on Betty's farm
Storing apples in the attic
Among the spider webs
#
Pathe Newsreel pictures
Of skeletal scarecrows
In striped pajamas
#
Poppy Day red
Smears of blood worn
To remember our dead
#
In Trafalgar Square
Crushed by grown-ups
Screaming "Victory!"
This poem won an Honorable Mention in the 2004 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Author Pamela Barnes received a $50 award. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Pamela G. Barnes
Pamela Barnes grew up in England and obtained a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology from University College,
London and a Masters in Fine Arts from the Slade School, London, winning an award from there that enabled her to travel to the United States.
As a practicing artist, she chose to live in New York City and found her way into radio broadcasting.
As she had grown up with radio rather than television, especially radio drama, she had developed what is called in
the business "a good ear". Consequently, she produced many popular dramatic and literary shows, including
a serial of P. G. Wodehouse's The Inimitable Jeeves, a six-part series of Djuna Barnes' Ladies Almanack,
a series on Animals in Literature, including Aesop, Joel Chandler Harris, Enos Mills, Farley Mowat, etc.,
and adaptations of Charles Dickens' The Young David Copperfield, Dame Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics, among many others.
However, it was The Mary Flowerpot Show, a weekly comedy in the tradition of Saturday Night Live,
which was by far the most popular program that she developed. Entirely her own creation, she wrote, directed,
acted in and produced this award-winning show which won a National
Endowment for the Arts Grant for excellence in radio production.
On coming to the West Coast, she performs and lectures for honoraria at various venues such as giving recitals of
Sappho's poetry with musical accompaniment at the San Francisco Main Library,
lecturing on Victorian poets and poetry for the Robert and Elizabeth Browning Society of San Francisco,
and giving recitals of Charles Dickens' Christmas stories at the Speech Arts Association of San Francisco. She holds herself available for commissions.
In a more personal vein, Pamela continues to write plays, poetry, and stories, most of which are unpublished at this time.
An exception to this (aside from the above award for her war poem) is her production this month of a Pantomime
called Puss-in-Boots Meets Rapunzel, a musical farce in the British theatrical style.
She wrote the script with a cast of twenty, including fifteen songs from Broadway, Operetta, Music Hall, and folk traditions.
She was its producer and director, and worked with a brilliant musical director, Ellen Hoffman, and
two local communities who were its cast and crew. The audience declared it a success! Its run is
over but please view the website at www.pussinbootspanto.com.
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