Dudley Randall's Ballad of Birmingham Dudley Randall's Ballad of Birmingham gives a poetic account of the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963. The poem was written in ballad form to convey the mood of the mother to her daughter. The author also gives a graphic account of what the 1960's were like. Irony played a part also in the ballad showing the church as the warzone and the freedom march as the safer place to be. Writing the poem in ballad form gave a sense of mood to each paragraph. The poem starts out with an eager little girl wanting to march for freedom. The mother explains how treacherous the march could become showing her fear for her daughter