A balloon caught in a tree is a small, slightly comic sight, and "Mister Balloonman" by LenaTerhaar starts by treating it that way. A passer-by stops, admires the colours and begins talking to the balloon. The questions keep drifting toward something less light, though. They ask whether a thing that has been lost or left behind wants to stay where it is, or wants out.
The opening stanza sets the scene with a casual shrug: "It's a nice contrast of yellow and blue." "Nice" is an unambitious word, as if the speaker is still only noticing a pretty picture. Then the third line turns it: "Blue tries to flee, tries to get free." The colour, not the balloon, is what runs away, so blue stands in for the whole object. Judging by the imagery, it may also stand for the sky the balloon seems to belong to, while the yellow tree holds it down. The sounds add to the effect. "Flee" and "free" echo "tree" from the first line, so the words seem tangled in the same branches. The repeated "tries" gives the line a stuttering, effortful rhythm.
The form works the same way. There are three quatrains, each rhymed ABAB, and each ends on the identical refrain, "Tell me Mr. Balloonman is it true?" The second and fourth lines of every stanza land on the same open "oo" sound: blue, true, you, true, blue, true. That gives the poem a sing-song, nursery-rhyme lilt, which suits a speaker who calls a balloon "Mr." It also makes the poem circle in place. The rhymes keep returning to the same spot, as the balloon is stuck in its one spot. The only looser pairing is "party" and "hardly" in the second stanza. "For sure it tried hardly" bends ordinary English a little, since "hardly" usually means "barely". The sense is plainly "tried hard", and here the rhyme seems to win out over idiom.
Across the three stanzas the poem also runs through time. The first is present tense: what the speaker sees. The second looks backward and offers two possible histories, a balloon "left over from a party" or one a child "couldn't hold on to". The third looks forward with "Will you stay there?" The refrain shifts meaning each time it appears. First it asks whether the straining is real, then whether the backstory is right, then whether the balloon will remain. The second stanza also pairs two failed efforts. The child "tried" to hold on, and the balloon "tries" to flee. Neither gets what it wanted, and both end up stuck.
The title adds a twist. A balloon man is usually a person who sells balloons, but here the name goes to the balloon itself, with a polite "Mister" attached. This personification makes the speaker tender and a little funny, someone addressing a stranger at a bus stop. The courtesy also makes the silence harder to ignore. The balloon never replies, and the only thing that moves in answer is "the morning air," which sets it "swinging". It moves without going anywhere, which is the poem's whole predicament in one verb.
The last image is the most ambiguous. "Shining in blue" could be light catching the balloon in the early day. It could also be a stubborn dignity, because even snagged and abandoned the balloon still glows. The poem doesn't choose between these readings, and that restraint is what makes it worth reading. The poem never states a meaning, but a lost balloon easily becomes a stand-in for anything left over, held too loosely, or caught between escaping and staying put. Because the refrain goes unanswered three times, the reader is left to answer it, and each reader's answer will say something different about what the balloon is waiting for.