Unpublished Poetry by William Barber Bancroft - Cloud moves in with her vegetable speed and hums of dawn

 I awakened this morning in the depths of a dream. The dream was about sharing some of Barber's poetry to the world. I've got limited resources to do that so the thought occurred to me to include some of his poetry in my blog. 

In this blog post I am choosing one poem written by Dr. William Barber Bancroft. Barber obtained his Masters of English from Auburn University and his doctorate in Critical Theory and Modern Literature from the University of California, Irvine. His untimely death in November 2004 left family and friends bereft and the world never received the full measure of his literary gifts.

I first met Barber when we were teenagers. He eagerly shared his poems with many of us during those years and the poem selected here was written before he turned twenty years old.  

This poem by Barber has lived within my memory for five decades. His description of rainfall was so precise and measured that it inspired a small piece of music that I created on my synthesizer.  

Cloud moves in with her vegetable speed and hums of dawn

Mists embrace and tell each multi-fingered tree that their name is fog

Each smooth pellet streams down and pelts each petal

Dots the dry mineral dry sand and is gone

Drop

Droplets

Droplets

Droplets drop

Droplets drop

Droplets drop and push the dust into confused and muddy drops

Drops

Drops the sand in chorus sings its song and welcomes in the rushing throng

Of all the beaded bustling life that flies and falls and knives the air

With fertile calls that sing and give from the sky each prism-ed ball that

Prisoners each passerby in a cloud of moist and stalls the motors and cuts

The grease and wets what was once dry and you cannot you may not ask the

Rain reason why it comes as it does instead of in mist that kissed and

Nourished-nursed the ante diluvial earth but instead rather had carnival

Down and wreak the mad and madnesses as people charge from flowing gutters

With plastics or anything on their heads to guard their minds from the mad

And madnesses that evoke from the rush that renders dead all the plans

And certitudes of the day that finally gives up the ghost to that host and

Stops

Drops

Droplets

Droplets

Droplets drop

Droplets drop

Can we not see the carnival that promises for a season

At least a hope or a reason to cease the confusion to be left undone

And turn our faces upward as the rain is gathered to the sun