Category Archives: sonnets

Sonnet: Susan McLean, ‘Day of the Dead’

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As if the day took on her warmth and calm,
above the blazing maple trees extends
a sky serenely blue. While kin and friends
assemble, breezes gentle as a balm
flutter the tablecloths and vibrant vases
of cannas and zinnias. Do we still remember,
given our lively chat and smiling faces,
we’re picnicking in volatile November?

Above the tableful of photos flies
a vee of geese, still low, in close formation,
honking in concord as they carry on
their sociable long-distance conversation.
We pause to watch them as they slowly rise
and fade until, like Mother, they are gone.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “My mother did not want a funeral, so when she died, my siblings and I were trying to find a way to commemorate her in a celebration that her family and friends could attend. Though she died in late October, the weather in Maryland had been freakishly warm for that time of year, so we chose to hold a picnic at her favorite park. I had learned about the Hispanic tradition of celebrating the Day of the Dead from my colleague Lupe Solis, so I thought that holding the picnic on November 1, with photos, flowers, and my mother’s favorite foods, would be appealing. Fort Washington Park is right on the Potomac River, and just as we had finished setting the tables, a vee of geese flew over us, still very close to the ground. The moment felt surprising and symbolic as we all stopped to watch them depart.”

This sonnet was originally published on Ken Gordon’s Substack The Sonneteer.

Susan McLean has three books of poetry: The Best Disguise, The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and her latest, Daylight Losing Time (Able Muse, 2026). She had also published a book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Crab Orchard Review, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Photo: Flying geese Jiaqian AirplaneFan Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Sonnet: ‘Maz’ Griffiths, ‘Archaeology’

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Chink-chink, clunk-clunk, there’s no escape.
You spade us from the ground, then scrape
our skulls and excavate our teeth,
spread naked what once lay beneath
mute earth. You want to learn our name.
Ah, we are levelled, made the same.
This bone-yard bursting at the seams
is one deep bed of blended dreams.

Our bodies are transformed and rotten,
and what you are, we have forgotten.
We wish to feed the shrubs and trees,
to nestle wild birds as they please.
We are all light now. Do not weep.
Heap heaviness upon us. Let us sleep.

*****
Reading through ‘Maz’ Griffiths‘ poems collected as ‘Grasshopper‘, this piece felt suitably Halloweenish to share at the end of October.

Photo: One of the Batavia mutiny (1629) victims, excavated on Beacon Island and now displayed at Fremantle Shipwreck Museum. Wikimedia Commons, 7 April 2014, 06:19:51, Guy de la Bedoyere

Sonnet: Richard Fleming, ‘Boy’

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He closes his eyes while, around his head,
like playground shouts, a flock of angry birds
explodes. He feels an overwhelming dread,
remembering his irate father’s words
and what the words preceded: those first blows
that pummelled his thin shoulders and his ears,
left him confused and with a bloody nose,
his much-loved, navy T-shirt stained with tears.
He blinks, refocuses. The birds have gone.
And, looking at his wristwatch, he can see
hours have slipped by like buses missed. A pawn
on life’s great chessboard, he stands helplessly.
Time flows around him. In it he will grow
to strength while it diminishes his foe.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “I’ve written a great deal of verse over the years, much of which I’d happily disown, but amidst that unruly scrub-grass a few flowers have blossomed. The bouquet presented here comprises a mixture of formal and informal verse, including a number of older poems that have appeared elsewhere: there are also several more recently written ones that have not previously been published.

          “The Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, is quoted as saying: ‘a poet’s autobiography is his poetry’ and that may be true to a degree but let’s not forget that poetry is a creative art, a flight of fantasy, therefore poems that, at first glance, may appear to be autobiographical will almost certainly have been embellished by the writer’s imagination.

          “The selection leans strongly towards rhyming verse: my preference, despite the fact it seems to have fallen from favour in the world of modern poetry. What odds? I’ve never been one to run with the pack.”

‘Boy’ was published in The High Window.

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his versatile work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Drawing from his Northern Irish roots and adopted home, his poetry and prose explore love, loss, nostalgia, identity, and modern life. Collections include Strange Journey (2012), held in the National Poetry Library, and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer) featuring the BBC-commissioned title poem. His work can be found on

Facebook https://www.facebook.com richard.fleming.92102564/

or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com

*****

Photo: Boy Walking Contraluz by Wilfredor, Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication

Armand d’Artois,’Oxen’, tr. John Gallas

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Under a porridge heaven (scourged with black,
and prickly-pale as sackcloth) drear and dun,
the road lays down its cobbles, mirrored slick
with recent rain and half a sickened sun.

A passer-by or two. Not noticing
the shambling creatures going to their deaths.
A troop of oxen, slipping on the slime,
heading for the abbatoir. Their breaths

resigned and patient; runny eyes that see
the emerald grass, the clear, bright streams, the fields,
the apple-blossomed ease of Normandy.

Silver-drooling snouts. Sometimes a snort
or sniff. But nothing more. Remembering
the sea. A passing smell. A passing thought.

*****

John Gallas writes: “I love ‘Oxen’, a little gem you find sometimes when translating from periodical/magazine contributions that mostly sank without trace over time. I’d be delighted. It’s from ‘La Parnasse contemporain’ (only ever 3 editions – 1866, 71 and 76).”

Armand d’Artois (1788 – 1867) was a French playwright and librettist. Here is the original:

LES BŒUFS

Sous un ciel bas, d’un blanc triste, teinté de noir,
Qui prend l’aspect blafard et morne d’un cilice,
La rue étend au loin son pavé rond et lisse
Que l’averse a rendu luisant comme un miroir.

Quelques passants s’en vont, flanant sur le trottoir,
Sans voir ces condamnés qui marchent au supplice :
Des troupeaux de bœufs, dont le pied trébuche et glisse
Sur le chemin qui mène au sanglant abattoir.

Et dans les yeux rêveurs de ces bêtes superbes
Sont encor peints les clairs ruisseaux, les hautes herbes
Et les pommiers en fleur du gras pays normand.

La bave en fils d’argent tombe de leurs narines,
Et parfois l’un d’entre eux renifle longuement,
Comme au ressouvenir d’âcres senteurs marines.

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.

“Herd of Cattle on Red Dirt Road, Vietnam” by AdamCohn is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Amit Majmudar, ‘If Eve and Adam Never Fell’

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it doesn’t mean two shlubs like you and me
would be in Eden with them. God knows I
am partial to a slice of apple pie
and grew up filching off a neighbor’s tree
the peaches he intended for his nieces.
How many generations would the ruse
have lasted? Theologians float their theses,
but sin’s a firecracker with a fuse

that heaven’s ghostly glow can light as well
as any spark that fountained out of hell.
Can’t speak for you, though I suspect I do,
I’d grow so bored, I’d climb the wall with you:
A derring-duo, deathlessness-defying,
we’d sneak out into all that lively dying.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “If Eve and Adam Never Fell” continues a long tradition for me. For a reason unknown to me, I have written obsessively for decades about the fall from the garden of Eden, in fact by sheer volume of work it comes in third behind the Ramayana story and the 1947 Partition of India among my recurrent themes. “Subtle Anatomy,” for example, is one of my first ever published poems, way back in 1999:

Subtle Anatomy
by Amit Majmudar

An arm is the spine of an angel wing,
cracked at the elbow. Webbed for gliding once,
we could leap off of cliff or bridge or tower
and saw no problem with a leap of faith.
What happened to it? Ask the suicide.
After the battle in heaven, the good angels,
precursors to the Turks who shamed their captives,
carved and carted off those wings—atrocious—
a mound of wings more chilling than a mound
of skulls: in this case, the contributors
could watch the ground tumor swell. So you see
we have some angel in us, even if
it’s the bedeviled kind, stripped of its wings
like a drunk pilot, out of service.

Before Eve met the serpent, she was fleshier
than even Rubens’s palette could stomach
and spineless, literally. The serpent
dove in her through the nest-hole anus
until the scorpion-stinger coccyx
slurped in too, and she sheathed him whole.
He straightened her, the breath in a balloon,
into this human posture of rebellion,
this upright and bipedal challenge.
Settled, the serpent sent nerves everywhere,
claiming each inch of her with senses.
Not with an apple but an apple’s taste
the serpent ruined her, fossilizing
to the vertebral column. So you see
we have some devil in us too
and dead center at that
commanding everything.

previously published in The Journal of the AMA

*****

Amit Majmudar’s recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and Things My Grandmother Said: Poems (Knopf, 2026). His forthcoming book is a novel, Cervantes in Chains (Slant Books, 2027).

‘If Eve and Adam Never Fell’ was first published in The Sonneteer

Illustration: RHL and GPT-6 Astra Light

Bartolomeo Dotti, ‘Abortion in a Flask’, tr. John Gallas

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To Giacopo Grandis, doctor and anatomist

Dear Giacopo, this sad, obscene disaster,
forever motherless, and piped of breath,
if ever it was living, died too soon,
and goes untimely to the feast of death.
And are the Humours of its tiny tub
sweet milk, or tears? For sure, its mother’s womb,
its first and living globe, was made of flesh,
and not the glass that rounds it in this tomb.
The embryo is dead: long live the corse.
Its promised Immortality cut short,
it floats in blood, aborted, come to naught.
O Man! O Slab Professors! Learn perforce
that this is Woman’s flesh and blood: more sweet,
more frail than glass; less strong than aquavit.

*****

John Gallas writes: “The ‘Abortion’ poem by Bartolomeo Dotti (1651-1713) is part of a work in progress (a History of Italy in Poems – featuring not the Great Monuments but the lesser poets from the 1st poem in Italian up to a poet b.1935). If you ever want any more, there’s 84. At least 60 rhyme and bounce.”

VII
L’ABORTO NELL’AMPOLLA
A Giacopo Grandis, fisico e anatomico

     Questo, Giacopo mio, sconcio funesto
cui diè morto natale il sen materno,
se maturo nascea, moria ben presto,
e voi d’intempestivo il fèste eterno.
     Non so se dolce latte o pianto mesto
gli sia di quel cristal l’umore interno;
so ben che l’alvo suo fu come questo,
poi ch’utero da vetro io non discerno.
     Vive quasi per voi chi per sé langue;
embrïone morì, scheletro nacque,
fatto parto immortal d’aborto essangue.
     Uomo, impara! Insegnarti al Grandi piacque
che sia ventre di donna e maschio sangue
piú fral del vetro e men vital de l’acque.

There is a brief outline of Dotti’s turbulent life here.

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.  


John Gallas, ‘Blantyre Sonnet’

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My new clothes should eat the pilau – Persian proverb

Refused admission. Speel’s. On Friday night.
Apparently my clothes. Not smart enough.
Full they said. Departed in a huff.
Ate at Goldberg’s. Went back Monday night.
Same fat bouncer. Wore my Paul Smith suit.
Nothing said. Nice table by the bar.
Cocktails. Hognuts. Champagne. Caviar.
Alligator steaks. Took off my suit.
Arranged it on the chair like that and that.
Spooned the food inside it. Then the drink.
Waiters looked the other way. I think
I proved my point. Paid up and took my hat.
Tipped the bouncer. Bowed at Bwana Speel.
‘I think,’ I said, ‘the suit deserved the meal.’

*****

John Gallas writes: “It’s one of my favourite ‘Persian Proverb’ stories (the original is a merry little read, involving a guest at a Vizier’s house) and making the sonnet was therefore – the whole content being pre-provided – an exercise in style, form, rhyme etc., a challenge I very much like – which is why I do so much translating. I also happen to think that the ‘message’ (though I’m not that fond of poems with ‘messages’) applies increasingly to a world of judgement by appearances, influencers, and pre-packaged (but, alas, empty-packaged) ideas of social success. I don’t often get this ‘relevant’, but the applicability just came with the story, and that kind of proves it’s timeless/universal, and not my personal grouch.

‘Blantyre’: has an interesting history – I was asked to ‘Rep of Ireland-ify’ it for a Food Festival in Cork, were it went down (haha) well – so I entered it for the ‘Taste’ poetry competition last year … and it won! So I have 2 versions – I think the ‘Irish’ one is a bit more zippy, but whichever you prefer is ok with me – I’ve attached the ‘Abhar Blas’ (‘A Matter of Taste’) version.”

ábhar blas
(a matter of taste sonnet)

refused admission – Friday night – at ‘Gator –
apparently my blús – not smart enough –
FULL they said – departed in a huff –
ate at Porkys –
went back one week later –
same trom Bouncer – wore my Trixie Blout –
nothing said – nice table by the bar –
tapas – Boxty Raws – Moss-Roasted Gar,
Thomas Walk Champagne –
undressed – laid out
my suit – like someone in my seat – and piled
the food into its lap – poured in the drink –
Waiters looked the other way – I think
I proved my point – paid the damage – smiled –
tipped the Bouncer – thanked Cócaire O’Neill –
I guess – I said – the suit deserved the meal.

*****

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.  

Illustration: ‘Blantyre Sonnet’ by RHL with ChatGPT-6 Astra Light. Not perfect, but I wasn’t going to waste time arguing about to collapse the clothes…

Using form: Helena Nelson, ‘Post-NSTEMI, as prescribed’

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We want your heart to function at its best.
Bisoprolol’s a helpful little pill (lol)
and aspirin’s a friend. You’re less impressed,
it seems, by side-effects of Ramipril
but the cough may pass. Any chesty pains?
Squirt GTN under your tongue. It’s droll
how nitro-glycerin expands the veins
and arteries. As for Lansoprazole,
undoubtedly protecting your digestion
from anti-platelets such as Prasugrel,
yes, take it. Eplerenone is my suggestion
as best antagonist. Won’t you pop that in,
O protagonist? And zap LDL
for sure before you snore—Atorvastatin.

*****

Helena Nelson writes: “After a heart attack, I was fitted with a stent in one cardiac artery and prescribed eight drugs, though one was optional (the GTN spray) and another only for the first six months (Prasugrel). I struggled to remember their names and purposes, so I put them in a sonnet, and as much about them as I could manage. LDL is so-called ‘bad cholesterol’. Bisoprolol is a beta-blocker and helps regulate blood pressure. Eplerenone is an aldosterone antagonist (this supposedly helps keep the heart muscle in shape). Make of that what you will. As they say on FaceBook, ‘it’s complicated’.”

Helena Nelson runs HappenStance Press (now winding down) and also writes poems. Her most recent collection is Pearls (The Complete Mr and Mrs Philpott Poems). She reviews widely and is Consulting Editor for The Friday Poem.

Illustration: “San Antonio Dr. Julio Palmaz and Schatz invent balloon expandable heart stent” by gunaxi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Bouts-rimés: Maryann Corbett, ‘Shelley’

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I struggle with his life. In that warm land
of his self-exiled end, a graveyard stone
hushes his willfullness, but when the sand
first mixed his ashes, didn’t London frown
and sneer that the infidel would now command
a truer view of God? And all I’ve read
about his careless loving (women as things
to take, enjoy, and jettison) has fed
a crabbed dislike. But let the poems appear
in their own strength—raging at old, mad kings,
hymning the autumn, moaning black despair,
packing in fourteen lines the whole decay
of human tyrants’ pride—and they strip bare
my morals: Wonder sweeps his sins away.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “What sparked this poem, quite simply, was an invitation from Ken Gordon of The Sonneteer to write a bouts-rimés with the end-rhymes of Ozymandias, in celebration of Shelley’s birthday. I fooled around with a subject unrelated to Shelley himself but decided that, given my instructions, the poem had to be about Shelley, so I’d have to do something with my conflicted feelings about the man.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry. A seventh book, Notifications from the Unseen, is forthcoming from Slant Books.

Illustration: Joseph Severn’s portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Wikimedia. The radical 19th century poet practiced the politics of the plate. For Shelley and other liberals of his day, keeping sugar out of tea was a political statement against slavery.

Sonnet: Bob Trewin, ‘It Doesn’t Last’

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No matter what you do, it doesn’t last:
Your best endeavours are gone in an hour.
If you could see the present become past,
Your better weather just a passing shower,
If you could see your garden run to weeds
That once was hoed and tended with such care
And understand you only bury seeds
That will outlive us, and will still be there
When we are gone, to sprout and live anew,
Would you think that your labour is worth while
To do the things you feel you have to do,
To make the effort, go the extra mile?
What else is there to do but push ahead?
So damn them all and be glad you’ll be dead.

*****
Bob Trewin writes: “This is my first poem in Snakeskin. I have previously appeared in some anthologies produced by the Holmfirth Writers’ Group (published by George Simmers, who is a founder member). I have also self-published two collections: Snowflakes in the Night, available from Amazon and the Lulu bookstore and Sonnets and Sundries, available from the Lulu bookstore.

“As for where this poem came from, I wonder how much you, living elsewhere, are aware of the rapid transformation that is happening in the UK, a transformation that no recent government has had a mandate to sanction, let alone actively pursue. If it is reversible, I will certainly not be around to witness it.”

Since scribbling some mediocre verse as a teenager, Bob Trewin put aside his pen for the best part of half a century. He began writing poetry again after retirement and now belongs to a number of groups scattered across the Pennines in West Yorkshire. He has won first and second prize in successive years in the National Association of Writers and Groups’ Open Poetry Competition.

“Garden work” by Bilderschachtel Photography is licensed under CC BY 2.0.