Champagne in the Mud.

Perfection of Autumn, her gifts:
sunlight on frost and long rifts
in white clouds

and largest of all,
the silence of sounds,
air holding its breath.

Sounds creeping round
like a thief in the night,
his bladder inflating

there on the grass -
slow infiltration
of colours too gaudy

for nature's creation.
Twin burner-roars
to show us whose boss.

Mouse-like. Too meek
with its squeaks
speaks the basket we enter.

Earth falls away
with the voices we cherish,
relations and friends.

Sound breaks the barrier,
the mist at an end.
A chorus of sibilants sings.

From garden and field
we are reached by clear speech -
the surprise of the day.

Another in store:
earth covered with flood
water, field after field.

"There's nowhere to land.
I can't put it down!"
It's O.K. by us.

Nothing lasts, there's a field
sloping quite steeply,
Dry at one end.

Escapement of air -
for real for this once.
Then comes the jolt.

The basket is toppled,
together
we're thrown on the floor.

Wind towards flood
the basket is dragged,
great squelch of mud

echo of sounds
from my days as a child:
knuckles - my mum's -

rub on the washboard.
We grate on the ground,
picking up debris.

Excitement of squeals,
then corks popping out.
Champagne in the mud.

Photographs, Memories and Nostalgia, was Jingle Poetry's brief for this week.

The young lady in the photograph is my daughter. She accompanied me on my wife, Doreen's, present for my 60th Birthday.