A Puzzling Puzzle

A Puzzling Puzzle

When I was around twelve years old,
I was a real jigsaw puzzle fanatic.
My Gran had a load in the cupboard,
And stacks more upstairs in the attic.

One day our neighbour gave me a puzzle in a bag,
She said, “This one will be very hard to do.
It has over one thousand pieces,
But without the picture you won’t have a clue.”

My Gran emptied the bag out onto the table,
And I turned over all the pieces face up.
Meanwhile Gran finished off her cup of tea,
Then she went to rinse out her cup.

We first sorted out all the pieces with straight edges,
Then we put the rest on a very large tray.
After an hour we had the puzzle’s outline connected,
And Gran said, “I think this will take us all day.”

Next we sorted out the pieces into colours,
But there was no sky-blue or grassy green.
It was clear that the picture was not a landscape,
It looked more like a busy indoor scene.

We found lots of pieces with people’s faces,
In fact, it looked like the inside of a church.
That knowledge fired up our imaginations,
So we got stuck in and intensified our search.

By the end of the day we were making good progress,
We had pieced together most of the congregation.
But it began to look like that one piece was missing,
Which caused us both a great deal of consternation.

Gran looked inside the empty bag,
But the missing puzzle piece was not there.
We searched all over the flippin’ place,
I even searched in my Grandmother’s grey hair.

Apart from the gap in the middle,
The jigsaw puzzle wasn’t bad I suppose.
But that one vital piece that was missing,
Contained a large part of the Parson’s nose.