© Roy Ernest Ballard 2015

Poems for Valentine's day

 
My Lady Butterfly

Are you a dark moth from a silk cocoon,

the flower wanderer of the midnight sky

who drinks from honeydew beneath the moon?

Not so, you are my Lady Butterfly.

When we were deviating on a course

swept all astray by wanton blasts of air

you fluttered on your wings of subtle force

to find your flower and  alighted there.

Whatever bloom you choose, whatever field,

your presence makes its beauty  twice as much.

Whatever plant with budding petals sealed

is glad to open to your gentle touch.

Ah! Lucky me that you have come to sip

my nectar and to take it from my lip.


The last veteran’s funeral

Of Great War warriors the last has died

and it is said that where he rests his head

all pomp and circumstance should be applied.

A high-faluting, royal-saluting ride

should at the last accommodate the past.

But all are gone! Old Simm and Powell and Jones

who had the luck to live through fire and muck,

shot, shell and hell and make at last old bones

and talk about the war in undertones.

We did not understand, we lucky folk,

Powell, Jones and Simm recalling times so grim,

so intimate the language that they spoke

of legions vanished, swept away like smoke,

how they were left to bear until the last

a sad, survivor’s guilt which never passed.

© roy ballard 2014