Muddy Goodness

I wrote this for my brother...my best friend, who somehow always manages to keep my inner child alive and kickin'.

Sun touches down to the floor like the toes of a dancer draped in yellow.

The cracked wood of the porch roof lets the light leak in

Dappling the chilled cement and leaving traces of gold, hints of warmth.

 

My hands, silvery and wan, seem pale compared to this lucid dancer and

I think I must be the moon.

I can never be as beautiful as that sun.

Not that it matters for I have one task at hand, anything else is

Ants to an elephant.

 

The mud is ripe for pie-ing, squelching like fruit plucked from gelatin.

The sun promenades across tin plates whose mouths are agape, begging to be

Filled with muddy goodness.

My brother's eyes look so much like those tin plates behind his thick glasses, catching the dancer

And widening at the thought of muddy beauty.

 

The air is thick with our sniffling noses and the clattering of tin plates.

Our fingers form the branches of trees and the mud slinks like a sloth between the fleshy boughs.

Too slow to escape the limbs, it gets packed tightly into the clinking plates.

 

Like dough, kneaded and plied, the mud soon turns from batter to firm cake.

My brother revels in the pat-smack-pat of his hand clapping against

The taught mud mixture.

He grins a piano smile, never interrupting his elated smack-smacking.

 

We search the ice cream cake earth for toppings for our mud masterpieces.

Little sticks, rounded rocks and calloused acorn husks become sprinkles and sweets.

A little taste before it's complete leaves gritty gravel crunched for hours.

 

I always heard that blood is thicker than water

Not for my brother and me.

Our thickness was mud, we stuck together like it and the shiny plates.

Our souls were always a little cleaner when our hands were covered in dirt.

 

 

 

 

Reviews

[Wildecat]

A well crafted poem, a pleasure to read.

[Susan S.]

I was transported by this, and that is how should be. Because I pick nits for a living, I've made some notes in the body, but for the most part this is a solid, well constructed holo-deck that I'll enter again and again.