My first sonnet

I Sought You Long, O Love
byPat Laster

Through mocking, taunting games of hide-and-seek
you torture and delay. A challenged sleuth,
I search in crannies vertical, oblique,
for angles, images. Like savage youth,
I rip apart the weedy, matted clumps
of phrases adequate another time.
Your shadow leads me further, over humps
of cliches, scrabbling for a word sublime.
Perhaps my efforts trample fragile seed.
Oh, accents, meter, rhyme, emerge now from
your hiding place. Give up; no more impede
my crazed, frenetic goal to pen a psalm.
The chase was long, through bramble, thicket, thorn;
The prize is won: a sonnet newly born.

c lovepat press, 1994