Life,
cricket and everything
On a wicket
life is played
with the bat
your father made.
You know cricket,
bats get frayed.
So: new handle, then new
blade,
next new handle, next new blade. .
.
same old bat
granddad begat.
How cricket scores
with metaphors!
I'm a bat?
Well fancy that!
Perusing more
this cricket lore
with faith unshaken,
life I see
should not be taken
Hoverfly
(Eristalis pertinax)
A micro
ounce!
On air with
see-through wings
I sit or
bounce.
Wings whiz! Flight ace!
I want to be and then I’m in
another place.
In one fixed
spot
I hang in
space;
then I
do not.
My cobble
eyes
watch front
and back
for other
flies.
I’m off!
I dash!
I spin! I
whirl this hovergirl;
quick as a lash
Blink! Zip!
I’m gone.
Bare is the
space
I hung upon.
1915-2015. The New Year Concert from Vienna
Blue Danube glides on to the planet Mars;
the Champagne Galopp fires its popping corks,
perpetuum mobile, at the stars
and Donner blitzes with its lightning forks,
in serried tiers,
the great, the good and peers.
From gilded panels hang cascades of flowers
that sweetly scent the music laden air.
The dancers show refined athletic powers
derived from forebears hung with tails and hair
who swung with ease
from prehistoric trees.
With bouquets, ballet, with the strains of Strauss
invoked of air with wind and wooden bow
Vienna surely never hurt a mouse.
Yet there are images I can't let go:
of Serbian women swinging to and fro
hanged by the Austrians
three in a row.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
and waste its sweetness on the desert air…’
Thomas
Gray
The desert flowers’ reply
We waste our
sweetness on the desert air,
as flowers did
before your race was born,
to tell our friends
we have a feast to share.
We need their
help; we have nutritious fare
to coax them in
to aid us. To suborn,
we waste our
sweetness on the desert air.
What fools are men, who strip the forest bare
and then suppose
that we are flowers forlorn
to tell our
friends we have a feast to share
in some
location for which they don’t care
then write in
verses with a kind of scorn
we ‘Waste our
sweetness on the desert air’.
The robes of Solomon
did not compare
with any that we
desert flowers have worn
to tell our
friends we have a feast to share
and they are
love-sick with the scent we wear.
For every
creature that the earth has borne
we waste our sweetness on the desert air.
© Roy Ernest Ballard 2015
