Posted tagged ‘draft sonnet’

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Draft Sonnet, Cold House – Choosing the Wrong Train

December 11, 2010

I’m typing up this post in a freezing (closed-for-winter) house which happens to have an Internet connection.

A sonnet!  A draft sonnet!   Because my teeth are chattering, fingers growing stiff, I am posting this before making final decisions about the poem, especially the last lines.  I’ve posted a few alternatives.  Any preferences let me know.  Any suggestions–absolutely let me know!

In a Hurry, Choosing the Wrong Train

I worry that, in my forgetting much,
the best route from here to there eludes
me.  I overthink, then blurrily rush
to a train I barely know that broods
upon the track while my regular line
goes whoosh (in my mind).  Beneath the slow chug
of this one’s start and stop, tremorous grind,
ears burn with trains not taken that speed snug
along their rails.  All for some two or three,
maybe four, saved blocks–my brain’s too tired
for the calculation.  The part of me
that invents tests it hopes to ace, that’s wired
for glee in a glide, tick-tocks by the door,
longs for time itself to open, offer more.

Some alternate last lines:

longing for time to open, offer more.

longing for time to spare her, feeling sore.

longing for time to spare it, feeling sore.

longing for time to open, time to spare.

Is “spare” close enough rhyme to door?


Categories: New York City, poetry, Uncategorized
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Slopes (By The Hudson – Draft Sonnet)

September 24, 2010

Slopes

Difficult days call for draft sonnets.   Here’s one written on the MetroNorth train up to Poughkeepsie, a beautiful ride along the shore of the Hudson River.

(This really is a draft, freshly minted; suggestions welcome.  I’ve used slant rhyme and, I’ll admit it, an uncertain rhythm though I do work with a certain foot count.)

Slopes

On the Hudson, they’re almost horizontal.
(In the heart, their sheer drop takes the breath.)
At riverside, they wear a dusky mantle
as they carve out the only darkness
in the evening sky.  I am the kind of
person who wants to beg a dying friend
not to go, but keeps enough of the mind of
reason, science, skill, to make me bend
that hurting will to the speakable.
Still, it echoes in my soul–’don’t go, don’t go’.
Eating on the train, my lap a table,
outside, a sudden night blanks high and low,
slopes of grass and bank no longer seen,
only lights–across, here, there–and, where close, green.

Categories: poetry
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Missing New York Storm Draft Sonnet (From Florida)

September 17, 2010

Windswept, wind-littered

Missing New York Storm (September 16th) Sonnet  (From Florida)

September storm in New York hustles through
in one or two, at most a scant fifteen,
New York minutes, and I, the professed New
Yorker, wasn’t in it; I who would have been
proud to complain of the urban canyon wind,
to bemoan felled branches, the wild thwacking
of the flag outside my building, send
this poem from a far place lacking
in tall, grey, and even, it feels to me, speed,
where everyone seems required to beam
in public, but some with stern primness (no need
to bring up politics)–I miss my home!–
its nitty-gritty, windswept, wind-littered, stone.

(Karin Gustafson – suggestions welcome.)

Categories: news, poetry, Uncategorized
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Inconvenient Body (Draft Sonnet)

September 14, 2010

I think it’s Billy Collins who says something about poetry coming from a place where you start out with nothing to say.  (Something like that.)

I should probably not confess that I really have little that can be said (at least in a public forum) this evening.  So let’s try for a poem, a sonnet.

The Inconvenient Body

The body is not of the modern world.
Babies do not nurse only before nine
or after five. ( I remember how mine twirled
a finger against hair, cheek, breast, in a kind
of slow-mo dance even when demons
screamed to hurry up this time, nod off.)
They don’t grow out of it–older humans
too refuse to fall in space allotted,
to manifest symptoms in an orderly
fashion, to fit recovery into
a three-day weekend, but sordidly
succumb to ills that don’t begin to
improve till mid-week (if then), their tick-tock
measurable enough but off the clock.

(I know the last couplet doesn’t quite work but it’s late and last couplets are always the problem with sonnets.  I welcome suggestions.)

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized, Vicissitudes of Life
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29th Day of National Poetry Month – Poem In Your Pocket Sonnet – WhitmanBack

April 29, 2010

Whitmanback, not Greenback (or, as it appears, Rasputinback)

April 29th–the 29th day of National Poetry Month–is not-so-traditionally “poem in your pocket” day, a day when everyone is supposed to carry a folded-up sheet of poetry on their person.  (In my experience, the main people who celebrate the day are students with good English teachers.)   Here’s a draft sonnet in honor of the day:

For Poem In Your Pocket Day

Amazing to think of a poem in
one’s pocket in place of all currency–
cash or gun—a bartered verse to phone in
to your broker, negotiable fluency;
“Song of Myself” read for a credit check,
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
serving for your OB.  For a higher tech
purchase, try a quote from Stephen Hawking–
not quite a poem but close enough—and
for those moments one faces something raw,
when, as they say, the going gets tough, and
life itself seems stuck in maw and craw,
what a gift to unfold one’s own scanned lines
and read in them word of other times.

F0r more on sonnets, look here, and also check out the poetry category from the home page.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized, writing exercises
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