© roy ballard 2012



Death

With the slow approach of thunder
distant drums alarm the sky
long before it splits asunder;
death comes seldom on the sly.
Or from unexpected summer,
from the heaven’s bluest vault,
gulled by the neglectful drummer,
we are felled by lightning bolt.
Only words and dreams can linger,
scurrying from mind to mind,
scornful of the moving finger,
noncompliant, unconfined,
from all death and time exempt;
dreams can never be undreamt.


'Only a poet can take and hold a country' Jim Bailie, RAF fighter pilot.


Ships pass in the night

I want to sing of love but sorrow comes,
then songs of sorrow turn to love again
We are at sea on passages apart,
night-passing once, bathed in a mutual blaze,
with the swell and the wash and the ships’ lights,
the thud of hearts and the beating of engines.
Our wave-washed meeting time-torn and erased
we become dim dots on far horizons,
the morning’s vast, erratic ocean emptied.
Far out from land there flies a joyful dove,
presaging harbour, confluence and love?


August

The chaffinch and his cheerful song
are gone, are gone, are gone, are gone.
A million times and once again
he sang as plain, as plain, as plain
that he had come and only he,
the master of the holly tree
and all the garden hereabout,
to sing the spring and summer out.

High on the holly tree deployed
he sang so we could not avoid
his long, congenial refrain,
repeated time and time again
until the summer’s wilting hours
had passed like disregarded flowers
and all the holly tree seemed bare
despite the berries growing there.

© roy ballard 2012


Do I remember the bluebells…

Yes, I remember bluebells. In the month of May;
leaves overhead, unbudding, were still thin.
The lane was mired in puddles on soft clay
reflecting sky and swallows, cumulous,
clouds white as choir boys and us.
A timid sun lit up the haze of blue
beneath the sycamores. A covert wood,
hemmed in by ditches long, so long, ago
was all the cover we were bedded in.
It was the season that brooks no delay:
when every flower is pressing into bud
and life is urgent to mix blood with blood.
So like a doting dog came love, full tilt,
and sent us sprawling on this bluebell quilt.

Grid ref 212023 Landranger Sheet 134


SS Obersturmführer Schmidt raised his pistol,
noticed the child’s hands,
little fingers, knitted sleeves
then discovered he could not fire.
Where do you wander now OS Schmidt,
blessed with the pang of pity
that once made you a man?


Heydon Church, Norfolk

The Bats that soil this church
are cherished more than it is
for the old religion
has no value nor power.

Eternal, empty wastes
of deserts bury cities;
the emptiness of space
has wasted faith away.

Archbishops should resign,
the Pope and all his pretties;
their God already has
and Olympus has been vacant for ages.