Ron Baker

Biography

Lives in Lancaster and is co-founder / co-organiser of Lancaster's monthly Spotlight Club. Writes poetry and prose.

Samples

0 yrs 0 mths Birth She could bear me no more and gurning birthed me. Bore me no malice but spurning cursed me seeing, as an aunt slapped my arse and nursed me, an errant spawn born of infidelity. While she fed the beestings we bonded in a misaligned alliance to the comforting drone of the shipping forecast. Partly relieved she claimed me. At storms over Ronaldsway, named me, half abjuring premonitions but tremoring at a sudden call. First footsteps. Coming judgement. 1 yr 6 mths Yearling In the beginning I was his broth of a boy breath of his life light of his loins his own gossoon to be nappied and happied and what a good chappied the apple seed of his fatherly mien to be horsey-dandled on a booted ankle and baby-buntin’d to sleep in his arms. Waking to work calloused palms fingers nicotined to leather a circular scar disfiguring a thumb. A winter’s worth of cold freezes the moment in sullen silence and words dissolve. What remains is. I am a bubble forming in a sea of air, the grain of sand inside the rock, the splinter at the heart of the tree. Was. I am becoming now his brat of a boy bane of his life leach of his loins a cuckoo child to be snapped at and rapped at increasingly slapped at hapless mote of his faltering eye to be coarsely bundled from a booting ankle and blah blah black sheeped right out of his line. Defined now by what I was in the beginning we have endured this becoming. 2 yrs 4 mths Sudden Movements ...displaced from Biggleswade the menage has been packed, all our possessions perplexingly stacked, on a Bedford three-tonner - ex-army good runner machine-gun turret in the roof of the cab. Our dad’ll find somewhere, he’s the gift of the gab. We are the mobilised fallout of demobilisation homeless debris from a disparate Nation heading Upnorth on the Great North Road to an airfield in Lincolnshire where we’ll stop unload and squatting make abode from The Nissen Huts. Corrugated, pitch-painted, concrete-floored tunnels. Were we’ll live just like gypsies. Stone rats in the runnels. Giving rise to a misconceived, family adage: You won’t remember you only came with the baggage.

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.