Bon appetit
Is yours a table set for one?
Your feast cannot have long to run.
A selfish hunger must be small.
Bon appetit to lovers all!

Love is a banquet made for two
so let us quaff each other’s wine;
I’m greedy for your heady brew;
you sparkle like champagne for mine.

There is no vintage to excel
the potent waters of your well
and since you taste it you must know
how sweet the blossom that I grow.

Bluebell wood

Between the oaks and through the briars

and underneath the sycamores

the bluebells run like spirit fires

inflaming on the leafy floors;

besetting lovers hotly yearning,

lying where the fire is burning.

Burning!

Burning, burning all aflame

with a fire they cannot tame. 

Tall nettles grow near Bluebell Wood

and rafters rot beside a wall

where other lovers came and stood

their names and faces past recall;

besetting lovers hotly yearning,

leaves and mould to nettles turning.

Turning!

Turning, turning fallen petals,

unremembered, turn to nettles. 

It’s time that damps the lovers’ flame,

impatient time that cannot stay

to learn a solitary name

but lets all passing pass away.

Blinkered time! But love is ranging

ever further, ever changing.

Changing!

Changing, changing as we lie,

changing into love gone by.

         
Bear
Those misbegotten dogs, O how they howl,
ears up and tense,
at darker darkness on the midnight’s edge,
at blacker shadows, at a deeper growl,
beside the forest fence
where Bruin, ragged as a winter hedge,
came through the palings with a casual crash
and now is ripping up the litter bins
for peelings, mouldered cheese and kitchen trash;
for bones, rich-smelling rinds and open tins.
Beyond the barking dogs I know he’s there.
They turn to me encouraged, push too close,
fly back, droop-tailed, so leaving me to dare
the infamous, the mighty and morose,
ill-natured, riled and hungry forest bear;
but he has slipped away, the burly lout,
the bins all wrecked and all the waste thrown out.

 

Common mullein, first fiery foot of rocketry,

leaps to the sky in fits of yellow sparks,

its fireworks failing in the fir-damp air.

Slowly, like a wraith, the dog's breath slips

through the rain-drenched trees

all hung with ghosts, long, grey and thin,

last year’s dead needles, jealous of the green,

the soft, new buds and summer's smell of pine,

the cornflowers to come and the cuckoo pint,

and all the summer things that come to pass.

Drains
Let's sing the muted music of the drains,
drains closely hidden in the wormy earth.
Only a whispered gurgling betrays
their laden surges in their secret ways
that carry off some dinner's last remains
to Thames or Channel or the Forth of Firth.

And yet consider how in fair-faced brick
some bricky, not so fair of face himself,
beneath ground level built a vaulted arch,
eternal mortar trowelled with a flick,
in caverns fit for leprechaun or elf
sunk from the sun and from the winds of March.

They much surpass the craftsman in their worth
think villa folk who're not too used to thinking
but if his brickwork, laid with casual care,
should leak along its length or round its girth,
like some crushed snake, to leave their boudoirs stinking:
if he forsakes them then?  O what despair!

© Roy Ballard 2013