My first sonnet

Photo: Sister Carolyn Hoggard

I SOUGHT YOU LONG, O LOVE

 

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 clichés, 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.

 

--PL, from variations, 1994