Poetry Friday: Sonnets

When the world seems overwhelming, write a sonnet.  I learned this from Jane Yolen, whose book Radiation Sonnets I wrote about here.  While her husband was undergoing radiation for his cancer, she wrote a sonnet each day.  It felt like something she could control during a time that was completely out of her control.  Those fourteen lines, the iambic pentameter, the predictable rhyme scheme, all leading to the couplet at the end that sums it up: there's something comforting about a sonnet.

I wrote one this week in response to the evil in the news.  Yes, I'll use the word: evil.  How do people come to terms with the evil that has been done to them, and still move forward, and have a life that isn't forever marred and ugly?

After mine, I'll share one by a master, Shakespeare.  I wonder if he found writing sonnets helped with all the drama of his life, whatever the real story is of the Dark Lady, the Young Man, and so on.  Maybe sorting his thoughts into those fourteen lines helped him to clarify them.  The one I've chosen is a favorite of mine, and I shared it before a few years ago as I bewept my outcast state.


Healed

"Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.”
Naomi Shihab Nye

“Far more can be mended than you know.”  Francis Spufford

The goal is not a mess that’s been concealed,
A mess that still torments your sleepless nights.
The goal is fixed, repaired, all better, healed,
Returned to Eden, mended, put to rights.
Is there a scar?  Perhaps; it’s smooth, it shines.
It’s made a road where once was gash and gore.
Walk safely through the field where once were mines.
Don’t worry; they’re not dangers any more.

Can it be true?  I want to think it can,
But evil’s strength is great, and terrifies,
The villains are in charge, that smiling man,
That smiling woman, wrapped in smiling lies.

Yet still we hope, we long for sins forgiven,
For waking, all our nightmares gone.  For heaven.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


Sonnet XXIX

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee—and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

William Shakespeare

The roundup is here today.