modern sonnet 2

This is purely self-indulgent. Of course, most of my poetry is.

I walk the silent streets alone at night
And stand bereft on corner islands lit
By graceless rays. I'm thinking that I might
Attempt to find some quiet place to sit.
In coffee-houses, dark and filled with smoke,
I struggle with ideas that mean nought.
I’ve heard the coffee-poets can't revoke
Their own poetic licences when caught.
In institutions filled with weary brains
I wrestle with the concepts that are bound
To cause my death. At times I feel such pain.
I wonder if my body would be found.
Condemned to highs and lows, this is my plight:
To walk the silent streets alone at night.

modern sonnet 1

I've been trying to meld modern sensibilities with the structure of the sonnet, with indifferent results. Here's one of them.

I love the dead - the dead so cold.
Oblivious to hurt and pain
The pageantry of grief unfolds
To people melting in the rain.
With sky that's grey (so like their skin)
Their hailstone teeth soon bite the dust
And tears that strongly smell of gin
Have turned their fingernails to rust.
The legs that could not bear their weight,
While backs that on the beaches bask,
Are shipping bodies home by freight
For faces hidden by a mask.
But arms dismembered from the soul
Are reaching, still, towards their goal.

St. Anne and Sonnet 84

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)