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Fuji Cherry

A dowdy, dwarfish shrub most of the year,
slow-growing lichen leprous on each bough,
breaks out a thousand buds when April’s here
and shamelessly proclaims ‘Come, see me now’.
Before the ranks of summer march this way
with flags and colours, banners, painted silk,
the eye is held so tight it cannot stray
by petal petticoats as pale as milk.
Her thousand flowers are a just excuse
to throw a party for admiring guests,
discerning friends who travel where they choose
to linger by the loveliest and best.
Excess of beauty surely shortens life;
it has its private purposes and ends;
it is the cause of jealousy and strife;
it brings out rivalry between its friends;
but this is true: the brighter burns the flame
the sooner gone; great beauty is the same
and when it dies our envy turns to shame.



Springer spaniels

‘You have to save them from themselves’ he said
and truly so
for into every hedge and ditch they go
but then he said and it was just as true
‘You need someone to save yourself from you'.

© roy ballard 2012
Triple spiral

By River Boyne they laid a tomb of rocks,
rocks great and small, all overlain with earth,
with one straight passage leading to its heart
where strikes the weakest sunlight of the year.
Rays of the solstice sun and only they
can fall upon the symbol waiting there:
an endless triple-spiral cut in stone.
Carved by a hand remote in time and tongue,
its years are thousands yet we read it still
and in its clarity it seems to speak
of trinity and endless union.
Writer in stone, we mayflies of the stream
salute you.


Street View

Like a lover, lost, forlorn,
I google up Street View
to find the place where I was born
which might be made anew
or still have those same, happy paths
my childish knowing knew.

Memory retains the best:
the woody hill, the stream,
things for a tiny time possessed
that now seem like a dream
and brief as motes that flash and go
upon a random beam.

A childish day is like a year;
my years are like a day.
What’s gone before is all too clear
for time tears veils away
and ancient have become the things
that I hold dear today.

© roy ballard 2012

A life is very like a holiday

Straight from a winged womb, passport controlled,
sent down a tunnel which no one gainsays
we come into a world both new and old
where things are said and done in unknown ways.
The language that we hear is honky-tonk;
the words we speak break every sort of rule.
The traders drink cassis and blanc de blanc
as we set off for loaves in morning’s cool
where those magnificents in fire machines,
the pompiers, at lunchtime take their ease
in scented shadows beneath evergreens,
on canvas beds, consuming loaves and cheese
while gorgeous girls pluck figs and give you one
and all is over soon as it’s begun.




Daffodils

They all wear the paper ruff,
the six-fold yoke of April, cruel lord.
They flaunt the colours of their noble lines
on herald trumpets coloured orange, red
or sulphur yellow or the palest peach,
exclusive ensigns of ancestral dye.
For only those well-born
are fit to dandy in his dire court,
to bend and bow before the shifting winds
of chancy April;
who brings hail despite the sun;
breaks necks despite beauty;
and of a sudden often lays them low.

© roy ballard 2012

To the Blackdown Hills in February
Three hundred miles we drove all day
along the busy motorway
until the hills began to steep
and green-eyed snowdrops, full of sleep,
came out from winter beds to stare,
to smile and tell us we were there.

But we were only exiles three
who could not keep their company;
at home we were but could not stay
for we were of the motorway
where hangs the hawk on threads of steel
and life hangs on the steering wheel.

When first we came to make our way
upon the busy motorway
we turned our backs upon the hills
of February daffodils
that flourish there with simple art ;
we had, alas, to grow apart.

© 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.

Line drawing © Doff Ransome 2009



© roy ballard 2012
Line drawing

I called my muse to book;
she would not stay
but stamped a pretty foot
and went away.

O mistress mine you sing
then disappear
and all my envy bring
to some new ear.

You leave an empty vault,
a desert dry,
an ocean sick with salt,
a bare goodbye.

My passion is to be
at journey’s end
where lovers love to see
their absence mend.

This pleasure cannot start
without this pain:
that we must be apart
to meet again.


In memorium, Peter Woodrow
The good shepherd

Thorns and nettles guard the fruit
along the paths he kept;
he said that they were ‘Fleet of root’
but thorns and nettles crept
into his fields to spread and sprout
when Peter Woodrow’s light went out.

‘A man who wanted’ said the priest
‘to live for evermore’
No, no my friend, not in the least!
He simply meant to draw
from endless time without an end
sufficient days to make and mend.

A minute from that miser’s heap
to patch a ragged coat,
to fix a fence for fattened sheep,
to clean a ditch and moat
where water birds and minutes scoot
and everything is fleet of root.