Line drawing © Doff Ransome 2009



© roy ballard 2012
Line drawing

I called my muse to book;
she would not stay
but stamped a pretty foot
and went away.

O mistress mine you sing
then disappear
and all my envy bring
to some new ear.

You leave an empty vault,
a desert dry,
an ocean sick with salt,
a bare goodbye.

My passion is to be
at journey’s end
where lovers love to see
their absence mend.

This pleasure cannot start
without this pain:
that we must be apart
to meet again.


In memorium, Peter Woodrow
The good shepherd

Thorns and nettles guard the fruit
along the paths he kept;
he said that they were ‘Fleet of root’
but thorns and nettles crept
into his fields to spread and sprout
when Peter Woodrow’s light went out.

‘A man who wanted’ said the priest
‘to live for evermore’
No, no my friend, not in the least!
He simply meant to draw
from endless time without an end
sufficient days to make and mend.

A minute from that miser’s heap
to patch a ragged coat,
to fix a fence for fattened sheep,
to clean a ditch and moat
where water birds and minutes scoot
and everything is fleet of root.

Black

Blacks beyond black there are and more beyond,
blacks blacker than a lake of bitumen,
wide firmaments of tar and pitch, despond,
asphalt infinities that swallow men.
Infinity is like the widow’s cruse:
however much is given there is more,
however much is lost there’s more to lose
with never any draining of the store.
Upon the deep, nigrescent, sly, untold
and viscous lake where even angels sink,
a slick of colours and a glint of gold,
an evenescent rainbow, oil on ink,
a shining, superficial, luring trick
puts bait upon the trap where we shall stick.

Oblivion

I came across a bridge above the trees;
it spanned a city and it crossed the seas.
As slender as a web, in quick ascent,
its length ascended to the firmament.
I mounted step by step and on the way
the earth beneath it vanished quite away,
diminished to a purple spot in space
and then to nothing, gone without a trace.
The bridge itself dissolved and in the void,
with every solid thing strayed or destroyed,
I stood in emptiness upon a rung
of vanished ladders where oblivion hung;
and all to be became a not-to-be
and nothing was, not even memory.