Redfingers

Spike next to my disappointing gladioli (apologies for the terrible photo)

My Gladioli are refusing to open. They stand in their vase, turning the water a pale green, stubbornly refusing to open. It's been a week. It looks like I have decided to display six giant spears of asparagus in a vase. They come with a little sachet of plant food, but I always give it to Spike in the hope that he might relent and flower. Sometimes I think Spike might be one of those desert cacti that only flower once every hundred years, but my failure with the Gladioli suggests that the more likely solution is that my fingers are whatever colour denotes lack of gardening skill. Let's go with red because it is the primary colour that is left over when you have finished making green out of blue and yellow. I have redfingers.

I entered a sonnet into a sonnet competition and received 'highly commended' (which I'm thinking of as 'equal-second - must try harder'). I was surprised how much the other poets on the website disliked the form. Some going so far as to enter a sonnet about their hatred of the constraints of sonnets into the competition.
Here's mine:

On Raver's Beach, with blistered lips, we drank
Our privilege - a champagne toast to days
Ahead. Looked inland as a charabanc
Spewed cargo mutely dressed in blues and greys.
"Not us (not quite)," we laughed and went in search
Of shade to shade our burning skin and ice
To chill the wine. There, underneath a birch
Tree's gaze, we laid a picnic paradise.
We ate and drank and dozed and when we woke
A charitable child asked: "You alright?
A bus just left with all of the old folk."
"Not ours!" we laughed indignantly. That night
We danced and partied barefoot and felt free
(And hid our breathless resting in the sea.)