The Hot-Air Balloon
Departing or perhaps arriving,
In the park it stands and waits,
Hot air blasting its insides,
Bursting full with expectation.
Just too late to catch my train,
I sit and watch from my platform,
The monarch of all I survey,
And yet confined, like it, to ground.
Proud in its bluff, full of hope
Yet going nowhere, it sits still,
The jumbo king exiled from clouds,
The Dumbo of the inner-west.
It sits and slumps, too early in
The week to be exhausted yet
Its air slowly departing and
Its grand puff on a sideways tilt,
Then down! No air remains and so,
Like a king’s dismantled battle tent,
It droops and its courtiers stand at its sides
To fold its grand promises up,
Its trumpets and its bugles mute,
Triumphal march today deferred.
The dewy ground receives its king,
All pomp removed by circumstance,
While I, deflated by the scene,
Must look elsewhere for my flight.
The Consolations of Writing 