Today is St. Anne's feast day. She was the mother of Mary and is usually depicted teaching her daughter to read. So it will come as no surprise that she's the patron of literacy, nor would it surprise anyone who knows me that I view her as my own personal star to follow. (This is why nephews and friends' children usually get books as gifts from me.)
The following poem (still in draft form) is not a sonnet in the modern sense. However, in Elizabethan Enland, the term 'sonnet' was often used for any short poem ... being derived from 'sonare' which, I've been told, means 'little song'.
Sonnet 84
My pen did not reveal my treasured thought,
Unguided by my hand across the page
Which stubbornly stayed blank, as if to gauge
Just how my jumbled mind could not be caught.
My blackest ink had dried upon my nib
While I tried sorting thoughts to get them down
And, yet, it was not black but muddy brown
Reflecting how my thoughts were less than glib.
And then today I found, to my chagrin,
I’d doodled in the margins of a book
Betraying the direction my thoughts took.
How can I cleanse this page of ink borne sin?
A fountain of ideas sprang to mind:
A knife can scrape the page, but leave a mess;
And paint is less offensive is my guess;
But ink can hide the marks I left behind.
Or, better yet, I could just leave the marks alone;
Reminding me of that for which I must atone.
(written May 13, 2007; inspired by the minutes of the Ottawa Fountain Pen Society)
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