Sonnet 7 – Hot Winter’s Night

Winter comes hard here. No snow falls, but sleet
assaults the streets, homes and shuttered windows
with icy disdain. My yahtzee score sheet
is nearly filled. Across the table, those

deep green eyes, not quite emerald, suggest
it’s time to retire, to seek some better
heat than the dying fire. I think how best
to free you from your rough, woolen sweater.

Sweet, diabolical intent consumes
me. China white breasts and your warm, taut thighs
enthrall me and our raptured dance resumes.
Tiny feet find fresh purchase and your cries

fill my ears. I scream. Tangled limbs unfold.
In deep winter, your love gives lie to cold.


Selene2’s challenge words were: sleet, diabolical, china, tiny, tangle, emerald, scream

Sonnet 6 - Fourteen Days

Fourteen days can change the world. Two short weeks
and all is wonder once again. Where I
had no words, no warmth, fair love once more speaks
and I can find an answer, some reply

which will not displease you, leave you wanting,
starved for true affection. I would hold you
now, arms wrapped round you, whisper slow moving
scenes to quicken your spirit. Hope made new

tastes sweet. Your mouth, your tongue, taste much sweeter.
I’d rest my head on your thigh, stroke your calf
till heat and need suffuse you. No better
time, nor deeper love could I long to have

than you, Bright Angel. Lovers should know love.
Let loving words bind us, and grief reprove.

Sonnet 5 - Sunday at Grandma's

Sunday at Grandma’s was ham and yams and
collard greens, deviled eggs and birthday cake,
sugared rosettes adorning the top. Unplanned
fishing trips before dark could cloak the creek.

A bull frog croaked a sad soliloquy
Until, joined by others, he lapsed into
Taciturn reflection of dusk and the
dragonflies above the water. Did you

find my cat’s-eye marble, beneath careless
feet compressed into that loamy bank? I
never once came back home less than a mess.
Grandma loved me and would hug and cry

As I got in the car. Driving away
I’d cry, too – I’d be in school come Monday.



((Lunabee34’s Challenge Words: taciturn, collard greens, soliloquy, rosette, compressed, loamy, curvature - I'm missing that last one))

Sonnet 4 - Mirrors

See me just so: Strong and sure, the answer
and equal to any need, bold and brave.
Then see me a lover: lusty, tender
and soft of heart and speech when that will serve.

I’d have all my thoughts thought brilliant - shot through
with wild white lightning, daring, inspiring.
I’d be seen as lovely as I see you:
a clear, clean joy; heart of hope; beguiling.

See me, dream me, make me. We envision
heroes, lovers, and gods to people our
days and beds, to meet and match our passion.
Expectancy can realize desire.

Your eyes are mirrors. There, I see a man
built for ages, created by woman.


((Challenge Words: brilliant, strong, soft, lovely, brave, inspiring, hope))

Arcadia

Autumn's come, my maple's leaves
have changed from green to brilliant fire
and, as if diseased,
lie broken, wilted, tired
upon unquickened ground.
Indian Summer's rebound

has exhausted itself against winter's
uncaring will. Soon savage winds,
by pity undeterred,
inexhorable and
cold will seek unshuttered
spaces. Home fires will sputter

and dance desperately for life and heat.
Forbidding, desolate, Arcadian vistas
whisper grim defeat
and pilfer hope as
surely as darkness speaks "surrender".
Yet, my love, as bright as spring remembered,

denies the dark, unhemispheres
my willing spirit. Freed from Time's
unforgiving year,
the heart's sublime
and unrepentant logic shatters
fear and speaks of matters

timeless. Like Sidney's Arcadia, my love dreams
a new reality. Her eyes, like starlight,
speak mysteries which seem
surer than winter, give respite
to my emboldened soul. Sweet peace
runs like sap by winter's cold released.

Unfettered joy and joyful revelation shatter temporal
constraints, dispel lack and loss, deny mourning.
In Arcadia, winter's ephepmeral
hold gives way to spring.
I rest me in her pastoral glade,
sure that all is light and all's right made.

Is there a canticle here intoned?
The heart's hemisphere is its own.


((Note: This one is for the magic, lost and recovered, and for hope))

Sonnet 3 - Second Finding

I would set aside obligation for
a while. Too long beset by darkness, grief,
I now know a sweeter love. I want more.
We made promises, sure in the belief

That we could see all our tomorrows spun
Out in golden warmth and ceaseless passion.
Then miles and months and years passed and, undone,
we could no more find our former vision.

With you, my sight has been restored. Bright, sweet
longing again flows freely, whispers “need”
and “fire” and “hope” to me. I am complete.
I’d sacrifice all for you, to be freed

from despair, from past folly’s cold binding.
Destiny? At least, a second finding.


Challenge Words: warmth, passion, longing, sacrifice, obligation, grief, destiny

Note: This one is an alternative (and more personal) sonnet, based on the challenge words from Sonnet 1

Sonnet 2 - Swept Away By You

I do not believe in love at first sight,
first glance. Yet I was swept away by you
when first I saw your smile, your eyes, alight
with fierce, feral joy. It was then I knew

I would desire no other. All my days,
I will remember the taste of your mouth,
yearn to touch you, hold you to me always
in a way neither selfish nor uncouth.

A hug, a kiss, a touch - a life! These are
the futures I want to write for us. No
more alone, I long to feel just how our
bodies fit, to smell your hair, and to grow

ever more intoxicated by your
spirit. All my life, I will remain here.


Challenge words: love, kiss, hug, touch, smell, taste, feel

Sonnets From The Ill-At-Ease

An Exercise In Writing

This project was formally begun Sunday, November 27, 2005. I had challenged my wife two days previous to give me a list of seven words, which I would then use in a sonnet. She asked if I wanted her to post a request for the same to her writer friends on the Internet. Foolishly, I said “Sure!” Could be a mistake. Within the first several hours, I had lists which included words like ”plasmodesmata”, “synesthesia” and ”kumquat”.

Oh, the horror...

Why sonnets?

I used to write a good deal when I was younger. I fell in love with the beauty of Shakespeare's sonnets in Mr. Turner's 8th grade English class at Roosevelt Junior High in Hamilton OH. Later, as an 11th grade student at Garfield Senior High, I was introduced to Richard Wilbur by Mr. White, the coolest teacher ever to walk the planet.

For a while, I dabbled in fixed-form poetry, but found it too limiting. I'm guessing it more lack of discipline and skill than any inherent limitations in the form that caused me to write so poorly, but acknowledging that would have required me to take responsibility. It is always better for the ego to blame lack of success on a fickle, failing muse than on one's own good head and heart.

I had written a great deal of free verse over the succeeding years and actually felt some of the lines to be quite good – yay me! But I found each piece lacked something. I was in Germany in 1984 and I pulled out my old English Lit folder from Mr. White's class, with all of my graded,commented papers and all of his mimeographed hand-outs. I still have that folder in my desk, in my office here as I sit typing. In there, I found Wilbur's “Mind”, “The Juggler” and “Still, Citizen Sparrow”. After reading and rereading them, I found wonder again.

Here was a man who built structure solid as bone and laid it over with words that were chosen with care and precision to elicit meanings and feelings the words never would have known had he not married them in verse.

Parke Godwin did even more for me in teaching me a deeper love for the language, for bringing two words together "just so", for hearing music and majesty and wonder again. Read "Firelord". I fell in love with the Arthurian legends when I read Howard Pyle's Arthur in a Reader's Digest condensed book when I was five - I've read every one I could find ever since. There's no lovelier nor more powerfully alive Arthur than Godwin's. If you can read his passage on Trystan getting kicked in the arse by his own horse and the several lines that follow, without finding your laughter choked and replaced by tears without warning, then you need a visit to the hill below the fires...

These two, more than any others, made me want to find a voice. From Wilbur - the elegance, the structure, the surprised marriage. From Godwin - the music, the poetry, the hope. If I could navigate these two and find a voice uniquely mine, I might be able to touch someone as they'd touched me, without dishonoring or compromising either of them.

So I started.

I had a very productive time in the mid-to-late 1980's, some output in the early 1990's, then nothing in this new millennium. Until recently, I just couldn't get the pipe unblocked. Marriage happened, kids happened, work happened. I allowed tragedies and trifles, with equal force and license, to rise up and tell me who I was, how I'd failed. We are what we hear, and we speak more to ourselves than anyone else speaks to us.

Things are changing now. Children are growing and leaving to start their own lives. Love finds new ways to call to us. I still long to be great and noble and good, all at once (not likely, but a dream worth the effort). And I find I still have things to say.

I'll journal and write essays time-to-time, but I keep coming back to Shakespeare and Wilbur and Godwin and what they have given me. The only way I can think of to find that voice in me is to build the skill. Good intentions are damning, so I choose to do the work.

Again – why sonnets? They're fixed form, demanding enough of structure to teach me discipline and require more of me than the writing I did in the early 1980's. I've been too long away, and these will be the baby steps that begin to teach me my craft again. I have no idea what this will become and only some notion of what it can become. But the work is good and clean and honest and, therefore, worth the doing.

The title? All apologies to Mrs. Browning, it felt fun. And this undertaking, which has already made me very ill-at-ease, is going to require some fun.