SONNETDamnit,
I
really
do
miss
ski-ing
It wasn’t all delight. At Crans I caught
A tip, tearing my shoulder at the ball,
Cracking the socket, facing a distraught
One-armed descent to the Swiss wailing wall.
The joint was luxé, squawked the harridan,
Who urged me to relax and not to scream
As others yanked on this prone Englishman
And others totalled up his bill supreme.
Yes, I was paying for those future days
Of hissing skis maintained in parallel,
Of turns that contoured all of heaven’s ways,
Of moguls charged, of schusses flown pell-mell.
That written self I often left behind
Is now in muck and bitterness confined
NOTE: The last line of this sonnet previously contained a mildly naughty word. Now I am professionally and viscerally opposed to censorship but some filtering sofware on the computer my younger daughter uses meant she was unable to open the post. On the grounds that there might be other nannying systems out there I changed the word and (the better the day the better the deed) made two or three other small changes. Since all the people who patronise Works Well are of superior intellect it won't need much elbow-nudging from me to hint at which word was changed and what it was changed from. Thus everyone whose mission is Truth Upon Earth may make the substitution in their mind and conclude that it probably hardly matters at all.
