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Summer Love
by Paganini JonesSum"mer, n: A period of fruition, fulfilment, happiness, or beauty.
(Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996)
During those final winter days she told me,
Softly smiling, Cricket was my Summer Love.
Hearing the thwack of leather on willow or pad,
Tasting summer strawberry teas, I nodded, smiling back,
Not knowing then of Cricket or of Summer Love.
Tucked under the stockings and lace of her bedside drawer
A newspaper clipping, finger-worn and frayed.
The inscription, Samuel Cricket OBE, lost at sea.
Her words remembered, Cricket was my Summer Love,
And thinking of a torrid Summer fling, I smiled again.
Talking of plans to renovate the cricket buildings, grounds
The architect in technical mode drones on and on,
The summer-beam holds up the floor. I start.
So Cricket was her Summer Love. No little fling but all
That bore her up long spinster seasons gone.
Little left but one old cutting, five remembered words.
House sold; her garden turned to wilderness;
The cricket pavilion deserted, falling down.
Too late to ask of Cricket or of Summer Love
Now that her winters past, my autumns just begun.
09/08/2004 Author's Note:
Another challenge poem, (sorry James!) this time a poetry slam in which 100 poets from around the world had 24 hours to write a poem of no more than 20 lines, any form, on the subject of Summer love. This poem got a commended. I received a book for a prize :)
Posted on 09/08/2004
Copyright © 2025 Paganini Jones
| Member Comments on this Poem |
| Posted by Maureen Glaude on 09/08/04 at 11:02 PM amazing, so polished with such speed. very poignant. Cricket as a sport was a huge passion to attend for my grandfather in England. In fact, it's said he caught a chill at a cricket match that led to his pneumonia at the end. Well done Pag |
| Posted by JD Clay on 09/09/04 at 01:12 PM I love the way you've captured the correlation between meaningful and illusion, by expressing the tangables in the forefront and the passing of memories held dear. Congratulations on your success with this beautiful, and sentimental poem. Pe4ce... |
| Posted by Richard Fish on 12/29/07 at 10:07 PM I love this! It's funny, cos in the first verse when I read "Cricket was my Summer Love" I imagined that Cricket was a sort-of male hippy figure (his real name being something like Hugh, of course) and that he took a nature name, like after the insect. Then I realised "oh no, she means the sport, I see..." - but then in the second stanza my feelings were reversed again, "oh wait, it is a person! though not the one I expected...". Nice one. :) |
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