Category Archives: sonnets

Semi-formal sonnet: Red Hawk, ‘Old Age Requires the Greatest Courage’

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The greatest courage is not needed for war,
but for ordinary people growing old.
Like soldiers, the aged are never very far
from death: many are called,
all are chosen. A soldier faces danger
then retreats, but for the old, going back
is not possible; they may hunger
for youth but pray for the luck
of a quick death. When one by one
the body’s systems fail, they must be brave
and face annihilation of the flesh and bone,
the Soul clinging like a shipwrecked sailor, to love;
finally, love is all we are given
to navigate between exhaustion and heaven.

*****

Red Hawk writes: “What inspired this poem is the School of Hard Knocks, surviving on Earth for 83 years, observing the chaos and madness of the human species, 45 years of self observation to see my own inner chaos & madness, and the Objectively Clear understanding that we all die, we all pay for our emanations, our lives, and finally there is the revelation that all & everything is the Love of Our Creator (whatever that is) & we are how that Love manifests in human form; the Love of Our Creator manifests disguised as our life. Following that, the chaos & madness which that Love takes in human beings is the result of it passing through the human mind & being corrupted and perverted by that screening process. Absent the interference of the ego structure, that Love manifests cleanly, clearly, and without judgment.

“The sonnet form is one of my favorite poetry disciplines & owes much to Shakespeare, Keats, & Edna St. V. Millay! Being one given to speaking too much & too often, this discipline has been a tremendous ally in taming that compulsion & mastering the tongue. Rhyme, though not in favor just now, is another tremendous discipline: it opens the gateway to the unknown—I may begin with a plan or an idea, but the demands of the rhyme send me at once into unknown territory: I don’t know what or how will come next to satisfy the demand of the rhyme and now I am subject to intuition & inspiration, the opening to the Divine.

“Red Hawk (aka Robert Moore) is not an Indian name, nor was it ever intended to be one or pretend to be one; it is an Earth name, given by Mother Earth many years ago after a 4-day water fast at the Buffalo River in an effort to save my life in one of the darkest periods of my life. Given to me during one of the worst ice storms in recent Arkansas history, it was given as an answer to prayer. It came about through conscious labor, prayer and wish, and was paid for by intentional suffering and remorse. It indicates a deep love & reverence for the Earth and how it has shaped my life. It is an honoring of Conscience and of the source which named me: our Mother Earth. To not acknowledge Her gift would be to disrespect Her and Her power to name and direct the course of my life; I am Her legitimate son. As the illegitimate son of unknown parents, Robert Moore is my adopted name given to me by 2 people who died of alcoholism; I honor it and them by the way I live my life.
You can google many of my books at Amazon, or find many of them at www.hohmpress.com. The book on self observation is now in 14 languages.”

‘Old Age Requires the Greatest Courage’ was first published in Rattle.

Photo: “Red Hawk” by Kiesha Jean is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Jean L. Kreiling, ‘Fado for Beginners’

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Fado (Portuguese): fate, and also a Portuguese style of music for
solo singer and guitar, usually expressing saudade, or longing.

Most of us long for something—love or wine
or one more hour before we say goodbye—
or feel an ache that we can’t quite define,
the pulsing of our blood a silent sigh.
In Portugal, we see the shiny thrones
of kings who yearned for women and for land;
we taste the port and tread the cobblestones,
admire bright tiles—but only understand
this place when we hear passion made of song:
when fado marries fervent poetry
to music. Then it’s clear that we belong,
for we too know desire and memory.
As if returning from a long exile,
our pulses, too, sing fado for a while.

*****

Jean L. Kreiling writes: “At a small, dimly lit club in Lisbon, my friends and I enjoyed delicious green soup and cod cakes, along with the attentions of a charming waiter.  But as a musician myself, with high standards and somewhat narrow tastes, I was not sure whether the promised Fado performance would appeal to me. When the young performers appeared between appetizer and entrée, and then between entrée and dessert, they immediately drew me into their spell of gorgeous sound and irresistible emotion. I was impressed by the flawless technique of both singer and instrumentalists, but more than anything, I was tremendously moved; I think I caught a glimpse of the Portuguese soul. I feel so fortunate to have shared the depth of humanity one hears in Fado.“

‘Fado for Beginners’ first appeared in the Sonnet Scroll of The Poetry Porch.

Jean L. Kreiling is the author of four collections of poetry; her work has been awarded the Able Muse Book Award, the Frost Farm Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, and the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, among other honors. A Professor Emeritus of Music at Bridgewater State University, she has published articles on the intersections between music and literature in numerous academic journals.

Photo: “Toni Frissell: Fado singer in Portuguese night club, Lisbon, 1946” by trialsanderrors is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Acrostic sonnet: Mike Mesterton-Gibbons, ‘Veronika The Cow’

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(Science has reported the first evidence in cattle of
using a single tool for multiple purposes, a skill 
previously seen only in humans and chimpanzees.) 

Veronika the cow can wield a broom,
Enabling her to scratch her back and breast,
Relieving itch. This Austrian, for whom
Old age brings fame, is now the manifest
New poster-girl for multi-purpose tools
In use by livestock, widely thought to lack
Keen intellect. But what if they aren’t fools
And, copying Veronika, attack
The status quo with brooms held high – if smart
Hoofed animals refuse to constitute
Earth’s humans’ prime rib roast supply and start
Campaigns to claim their basic right, pursuit
Of happiness? . . . Will humans have a beef
With Austria’s tool-user-cow-in-chief?

*****

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons writes: “Yes, Veronika uses opposite ends of the broom for different purposes. There’s a nice video of her in action on the Science website where I first read about her. The article and video are here: https://www.science.org/content/article/no-bull-austrian-cow-has-learned-use-tools“

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England.  His poems have appeared in Current Conservation, the Ekphrastic Review, Light, Lighten Up Online (where this poem was first published), the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, WestWard Quarterly and other journals. Links to all these poems can be found at  https://www.math.fsu.edu/~mesterto/Unscramble/wordplay.html. In 2025 he won the Children’s Unpublished category of the Eyelands Book Awards with Flora’s Flock and Other Stories to Read Aloud.

“Veronika’s tooling technique and targeted areas (cow tools)” by Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró, Alice M. I. Auersperg is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Sonnet: Meredith Bergmann, ‘Public Art’

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A girl, eleven, racing down the street
(who might be an imaginary daughter)
pulled by her Lab (a female?) plants her feet
before a statue whose bronze skirt has caught her
big dog’s attention.
Works of art command
our gaze, on average, for three seconds. Thought
or feeling must work quickly. We can’t stand
like statues—life is taxed and overwrought.
She doesn’t have her gadget, so she scans
the stone: “Remember”, “Deepen” and “Surpass.”
Her dog is eager for a fresher scent.
The sculptures, though, are asking if she can
imagine she might wield these words. It’s fast.
This is the moment of the monument.

*****

‘Public Art’ was originally published in The Sonneteer.

Meredith Bergmann is an award-winning sculptor whose public monuments can be seen in New York, Boston and beyond. Her Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument was unveiled in Central Park in August 2020, and she recently unveiled a monument for the historic center of Lexington, MA. Her many poetry publications include Barrow Street, Connecticut River Review, Contemporary Poetry Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, New Criterion, New Verse Review, Tri Quarterly Review and the anthologies Hot Sonnets, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism, Powow River Poets Anthology II, and the forthcomingThe Country in the Mirror: Poems of Protest and Witness. She was poetry editor of American Arts Quarterly from 2006-2017. She has won three honorable mentions from the Frost Farm Poetry Prize, and in 2020, a 2nd prize from the Connecticut Poetry Club. Her chapbook A Special Education is available online from Bainbridge Island Press, and The Dying Flush, with poetry and illustrations by Bergmann, 2024 is available from EXOT Books.

Photo of Boston Women’s Memorial, Meredith Bergmann, 2003, from City of Boston

Sonnet: Saad Kayani, ‘Sonnet’

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I see no pretty things to write about.
Industrial smoke obscures the summer skies.
No novel image schemas to lay out—
no logical entailments to devise.
I’ll write instead of how efficient, say,
a cluster bomb can be, the skill it takes
to mow the grass on which the children play
and monetize the rubble that it makes.
But better artists beat me to that muse:
the medalists whose medals killers win,
the columnists who weave the daily news,
and spin, and spin, and spin, and spin, and spin!
I’m dizzy now—no pretty things to say.
Poetry is for fascists anyway!

*****

‘Sonnet” was first published in Snakeskin.

Saad Kayani lives in Toronto. Recent poems appear in Shot Glass Journal and Neologism Poetry Journal.

Photo: “GAZA Crisis July 2014” by Syeda Amina Trust® is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: Paul Burgess, ‘Asymmetrical War’

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They’re hoping schools won’t rain as rubble showers
resulting from an errant missile strike.
I can’t afford the drive to see the flowers
around the gorge I’d waited months to hike.
They fear they’ll find their children split in half
or buried under shrapnel, dust, and rocks.
I’m scared the jagged line upon a graph
will show decreasing values of my stocks.
Their sky’s become an endless sea of threats
erupting with the sights and sounds of war,
but over here, we’re making mobile bets
on every prop the market’s apps can score.
There’s something vaguely troubling, sad, and dark
about an age of gulfs so deep and stark.

*****

Paul Burgess writes: “I am grateful that we are safe here in the U.S., but I also feel queasy thinking about the fact that Iran is really experiencing the horrors of war while we are fretting about gas prices (with reason, of course), watching the stock market (again, understandable but minor compared to fearing for one’s life), and literally betting on various war-related scenarios and outcomes (sociopathic at best).”

‘Asymmetrical War’ was first published in the The New Verse News

Paul Burgess is the sole proprietor of a business in Lexington, Kentucky that offers ESL classes in addition to English, Japanese, and Spanish-language translation and interpretation services. He has contributed work to Blue Unicorn, The Road Not Taken, Light, The Orchards, Snakeskin, Pulsebeat, Lighten Up Online, Apricity, Star*Line, Asses of Parnassus, The New Verse News, and many other publications.

“Electron asymmetric motion animation” by Sbyrnes321 is marked with CC0 1.0.

Sonnet: Barbara Loots, ‘Intimations’

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This is a Wordsworth morning. Not a leaf
trembles, the water shimmers beneath a shawl
of vapor, and the wild primordial call
of one loon sounds its tremolo of grief
across the lake. The sunlight like a thief
infiltrates slowly, making shadows crawl
out of the hollows where each animal,
furred, feathered, winged or scaled, to its brief
life awakens. My awakened eyes
and all the senses that belong to me
discover in the love that glorifies
whatever was and is and is to be
the wonder and perpetual surprise
of momentary immortality.

*****

Barbara Loots writes: “My husband Bill and I spend summer months in Canada on a tiny pile of granite dropped by a glacier in the middle of Blackwater Lake near Parry Sound, Ontario. Bill’s father purchased the island right after WWII for the tiny price of a property owned by the Crown, in a deal similar to the American Homestead Act: you must build a domicile on it within 18 months. The cottage cobbled together at that time still stands, with a few improvements, not yet including running water, electricity, or indoor plumbing. We bring a lot of books. I often meet the Muse among the towering White Pines. Poems are a natural consequence. Many of them appear in my collection The Beekeeper and other love poems (Kelsay Books 2020).”

“Intimations” appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of The Lyric (Volume 105 Number 4).

After decades of publishing her poems, Barbara Loots has laurels to rest on, but doesn’t. Residing in Kansas City, Missouri, Barbara and her husband, Bill Dickinson, are pleased to share the household with an acrobatic tuxedo kitty named Jane Austen. Barbara has work forthcoming in The Orchards Journal, The Shining Years II anthology, and I-70 Review. Her concerns and complaints can be found on Facebook and at barbaraloots.com. She serves as the review editor for Light Poetry Magazine (see Guidelines at lightpoetrymagazine.com). 

“Early morning lake” by josterpi is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Sonnet: Timothy Sandefur, ‘Aubade’

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I kiss you every morning, even though
you’re far away; even though your bed’s
a thousand miles out of reach. I know
it’s fantasy — only in my head —
I know I cannot slide my fingertips
across the smooth skin of your shoulders, your arms —
or along the sleek sloping of your hips —
or fall into oblivion in the warm
raven tangle of your hair — and that
it’s just poetic silliness to think
that you can feel my chest against your back,
or the brush of flesh when my body instinct-
ively reacts —
               and yet somehow I feel
the distance, not the touch, is what’s unreal.

*****

‘Aubade’ was originally published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

Timothy Sandefur is an attorney practicing law in Phoenix, and also the author of several books including biographies of Frederick Douglass and Jacob Bronowski, and a book of poems called Some Notes on the Silence. He has a Substack page: sandefur.substack.com.

“5/365 – Reach Out {Explored}” by susivinh is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Daniel Kemper, ‘We Talked’

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Why the mumbled answers, often feeling
weary, staring out the window: bitter,
wistful, dreamy, harried — always reeling,
not engaging, letting out a titter,
mocking laughs or strange and distant crying?
But eventually she says it’s cancer,
not affairs, not me – then we were trying,
talking even if there was no answer.
But I would have those awful times again:
I whispered her to sleep and once she slept
I stroked her scalp and tucked her sheets, and then
I ran off to the shower and I wept.
We talked. We really talked though it was draining,
as one, about the time that was remaining.

*****

Daniel Kemper writes: “This poem is utterly imagination, perhaps of the “O my prophetic soul” variety. Alexandra (that’s her name) and I were out of contact at the time, but it would have been right as she came down with cancer, if I have my timeline right. It’s a multi-meter sonnet of the kind I thought probably the easiest to which I could introduce people. It starts off in trochaic meter and changes to iambic at the volta. This design choice was to have descending meter for the down mood, and when looking at the bright spot, change to ascending meter. The couplet unifies them via iambic meter plus feminine endings, hopefully that accented the coming together of the two at the end, even if unconsciously.”

‘We Talked’ was originally published in Rat’s Ass Review.

Daniel Kemper, a former tournament-winning wrestler, black belt in traditional Shotokan karate, and infantryman has earned a BA in English, an MCSE (Systems Engineering), an MBA, and an MA in English and had works accepted for publication at more than a dozen magazines, including a pushcart nomination. He’s been an invited presenter at PAMLA 2024 and presided over the Poetics Panel in 2025 and has been the feature poet at several Sacramento venues.

Photo: “Sick Day” by RLHyde is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.


 

Sonnet: Keith Roberts, ‘Lather’

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Inside the shower’s stream the morning blurs,
ceremony wakes on white marble tile;
brushed steel and shaving brush wait, rituals
that ask the rushing mind to pause a while.

The bowl presents the soap, the steam the heat;
damp badger bristles swirl, patient and slow.
No canned foam, no gelled and fleeting cheat,
hands repeating what older barbers know.

The lather builds like weather in the hand,
a cloud coaxed up from water, soap, and time;
slow turns that ask a man to pause and stand
at break of day before its clamors chime.

Hands learned the quiet patience of the bowl,
small weather turning slowly in the soul.

*****

Keith Roberts writes: “I’d be remiss if I didn’t give my wife credit for this poem. For my birthday she gave me a bowl, a brush, and a puck of all-natural shave soap from a local artisan. A little whisk into lather, the woody-whiskey scent comes up, and suddenly I swear I can hear modal jazz somewhere in the background. In a world built around consumption, algorithms, and binary takes, it’s important to our humanity to rediscover the transcendent in small, ordinary experiences like this. And maybe more importantly, to listen when other people share theirs. This poem is a thank you to my wife for helping me find one.

“I’m just starting this writing and poetry journey.  I’m a recovering math major with graduate degrees in Computer Science and Computational Social Science. Most of my career was spent living in the abstract: programming, modeling, data, systems. When my dad passed away a couple of years ago, something in me shifted. I started writing partly as a way to process the loss and partly to leave my kids something more durable than an Instagram feed. Also, and this is important, it gives me great comfort knowing that dad jokes can, in fact, achieve a kind of immortality…even in sonnet form. If that garners a few more eye rolls from my kids after I’m gone, I’ll consider my work a success.”

‘Lather’ was first published in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily

Photo: “Lather” by RLHyde is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.