"Oh, I love your wooden floors." "Yes, I love them too,
but I would so love carpet more for just a year or two."
"I like the ceramic tiles." "Yes, they're great, I know,
but give me cork or lino until the children grow."
It's the noise that drives me spare, shoes and toys that startle,
that dragging din of chairs and a bag of wayward marbles.
The tumbling as the Lego box is emptied down the hall,
the dumping of a box of pens and bouncing tennis balls.
The sound of dice, giant wooden ones, (I bought them the damn game),
bashes through my brain like drums until I feel insane.
At just the right sky-diving height my piano is the ledge
where Elsa and her friends unite and jump the keyboard edge.
Then heads and arms and dresses, hard plastic, but of course,
crash down to ground level with eardrum-bursting force.
The ponies, all those ponies, it's like they can't stay still,
canter at highest decibels as if they have free will.
Books are made of paper so you'd think that they'd be silent
but knock them from a four foot height for a bang that's violent.
It would be futile, really, unless, as well as floors,
I pad the walls and ceilings, the windows and the doors.
And, lets be fair, the children are behaving as they should
I'm the one who despairs that the floors are made of wood.
There is another way I think, it might just change my luck
to get some underlay and block my ear canals right up.
Could I get a quote for insulation, how much would it be
to kit me out with soundproofing on my two auditories.
But, wait, what's that? Could it be? I'm starting to feel scared.
Now my nerves are really shot, there's quiet in the air.
(Explanation: I'm sure this needs no explanation. However, I do want to point out that my children are great! And, that we can't have rugs or carpets, etc. because Holly, our four-year-old, has a severe allergy to dustmite so we try to keep soft furnishings to an absolute minimum. This summer in Ireland is miserable and that doesn't help: Normally, we spend our Summers outside all day.
I really like how West Cork people (my husband is a West Corkonian) make verbs out of nouns, 'noising' is something Martin says for 'making noise'. When he asks the children, "what is all that noising about?" they fall around the place laughing at him.)
