Saturday, June 6, 2015

My first sonnet


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

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