Sunday Afternoon

Snatches of music, the TV is on,
Unfamiliar voices,
A man and woman, talking in turn,
Taking turns,
Canned laughter,
My wife joins in,
Applause.

The front door rattles,
Footsteps in the hall
My wife talks to the kids,
Echoing,
Indistinct,
The kids reply.

The cat demands food,
Persistently, insistently,
Then scrabbling,
Claws on a wooden floor,
Children's laughter,
Then more meowing.

The cathedral clock chimes,
Quarter to the hour,
The kitchen clock ticks,
The cat purrs,
The children coo and laugh,
The sounds of Sunday afternoon.

©️ Graeme Williams 2019

"Sunday Afternoon" came about as another Futurelearn assignment in which we used our immediate environment as a source of material. It was suggested that we watch and describe what was around us. I decided to use what I could hear rather than what I could see so, in some ways, it almost became an exercise in mindfulness.

I've altered the order of the lines so that it flows better; the original list was a random collection of sounds as I became aware of them. Now it almost tells a story.