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

personally.

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