Category Archives: sonnets

Sonnet: Barbara Loots, ‘Climbing’

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I have begun to narrow down desire.
As though tracing a river to its source
I climb, charting the change higher and higher
from placid meander to the turbulent course
where it began. I have loved much, not well,
collecting worlds to carry on my back.
What shall I leave? The spirits that compel
this climb demand a spare and steady pack.
Leave beauty, wonder. They are everywhere.
Leave hope, and drink from the relentless stream.
Leave knowledge, learn trust in the nimble air
until, suspended by a slender dream,
you seek only to climb, and not to know
where you came from, where you have to go.

*****

Barbara Loots writes: “Climbing is one of my earliest successful sonnets. Over the decades, I have turned to it again and again as life bears out its wisdom.”

After decades of publishing her poems, Barbara Loots has laurels to rest on, but keeps climbing. The recent gathering at Poetry by the Sea in Connecticut inspired fresh enthusiasm. Residing in Kansas City, Missouri, Barbara and her husband Bill Dickinson are pleased to welcome into the household a charming tuxedo kitty named Miss Jane Austen, in honor of the 250th birthday year of that immortal. She has new work coming in The Lyric, in the anthology The Shining Years II, and elsewhere. She serves as the Review editor for Light Poetry Magazine.

Photo: “Himalayian Stream of Life” by Lenny K Photography is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: Juleigh Howard-Hobson, ‘What a Shame Spell’

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To ruin anyone’s potential, you
Will need things like this: shell from a chicken’s
Egg that broke when it fell from its nest to
The ground, unhatched. Unfastened safety pins
That were found, not bought. Seeds, germinated,
Then boiled before the first leaves unfurled and
Turned green. Dead caterpillars. Negated
Contracts. Unopened catalogues. A hand
From a working clock. Beads from a wedding
Dress that was returned. At least one item
Must have been stolen from your target. Bring
These together, dig a 6 foot hole, then
Bury them. As you bury, state the name
Of who you want ruined, adding: ‘What a shame’.

*****

Juleigh Howard-Hobson writes: “This wicked sonnet was inspired by jealous fairytale stepmothers, and characters like Daphne Du Maurier’s Mrs. Danvers. Oh, and coming upon a bunch of dead green caterpillars lying under a tree…  Besides first appearing in Coffin Bell, it is included in my book, Curses, Black Spells and Hexes: a Grimoire Sonnetica (Alien Buddha). Of all the spell sonnets I’ve written, this is one of the wryest. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst friend.”

Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s work can be found in Think Journal, Able Muse, New Verse Review, Coffin Bell Magazine (including this poem), The Deadlands, Autumn Sky Poetry and other venues. She has been nominated for “The Best of the Net”, Pushcart, Elgin & Rhysling Awards. A member of the HWA and the SFPA, she lives on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. In a poetically haunted house. 
X: poetforest

“Try Digging A Whole On the Big Island” by Tommys Surfshack is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: Marion Shore, ‘Embarking’

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Despite the dreams and yearnings that lie drowned,
the flotsam of desire, the fearful straits,
the capsized hope, the passion gone aground,
the tides too treacherous to navigate,
you lift your gaze each time love reappears
like an ocean liner gliding through the dark,
without a thought you rush down to the pier
and climb aboard and once again embark,
and stand upon the deck ablaze with light,
and raise your glass beneath the glittering stars,
and watch the harbor slowly fade from sight,
not caring where you’re going, or how far —
knowing the odds are slim that you’ll survive,
yet never having felt quite so alive.

*****

Marion Shore writes: “Embarking is a riff on Petrarch’s sonnet Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio (Canzoniere 189), contrasting the festive departure of the ocean liner into the unknown, with the inevitable shipwreck of Petrarch’s beleaguered vessel. You could say “Embarking“ is sort of a prequel to Petrarch’s poem–with a hint of Titanic thrown in.”

Marion Shore is the author of For Love of Laura: Poetry of Petrarch, a collecion of Petrarch’s poetry in translation published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1987. Her work has also appeared in Poems from Italy; Petrarch in English; 150 Contemporary Sonnets; and Rhyming Poems: A Contemporary Anthology. Her poems and translations have been published in numerous journals including The Formalist, Light Quarterly, Iambs and Trochees, First Things, and Measure. Recipient of the 2010 Richard Wilbur Award for Sand Castle (from which this poem is taken) and two-time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, she lives in Springfield, MA.

Photo: “Berlin Cruise liner docked at Waterford” by mike65ie is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Marcus Bales, ‘A Rainy Day in Cleveland’

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A rainy day in Cleveland. I almost said
“The skies are gray.” Of course the skies are gray,
It’s raining, so — what could they be instead?
I meant to mow the rest of the lawn today,
But it’s a day to watch the garden grow.
The finches, flashing in the too-long grass,
Are pecking dandelion seeds, and glow
Their special yellow through rain-dotted glass.
The internet is off. I sit and watch
The irises and roses in the rain,
And do not read about the ugly botch
The greedy criminals in charge sustain
So they can strut around, so white, so male,
And cheat and lie to keep themselves from jail.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “The rap against democracy has until now always been that the public, once it realized they could simply vote themselves money and benefits, would bankrupt the state voting themselves benefits and money. For 250 years the US public managed not to do that, though the reactionaries always accused them of it. It turns out the real danger is that if you have enough money you can just buy the government and operate it as a racket to benefit yourself and your cronies, even when there are laws in place that you have to break in order to do so. The problem with democracy, it turns out, is not that people are irresponsible but that the wealthy are liars and thieves.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ’51 Poems’ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks – Form in Formless Times.

Photo: Danny redd Photography https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1605166609548538

Sonnet: Gail White, ‘Catherine Howard’

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(Fourth Wife of King Henry VIII)

The teenage bride the Norfolks gave the king
lacked only brains and her virginity.
Henry was in no mood for questioning
his rose without a thorn.  If only she
had borne a son, he never would have doubted
her purity.  But as the months went by
her youthful dalliance with boys was outed,
then the king’s young attendant caught her eye
and there were secret meetings, hide and seek.
It all came out.  She wrote to beg for grace,
pleading that men were bold and girls were weak,
and Henry wept, but nothing could efface
her crime.  The headsman ended all her pains.
Sometimes it pays a woman to have brains.

*****

Gail Whie writes: “After reading Gareth Russell’s excellent biography of Catherine, Young & Damned & Fair, I decided to take a leaf out of Daniel Galef’s Imaginary Sonnets and give her a sonnet of her own.  I figured that any woman who would commit adultery while married to Henry the Eighth must be either desperate or spectacularly stupid.  And on the path to inevitable execution, I think she really broke the king’s heart.”

Gail White lives in the Louisiana bayou country with her husband and cats.  Her latest chapbook, Paper Cuts, is available on Amazon, along with her books Asperity Street and Catechism.  She appears in a number of anthologies, including two Pocket Poetry chapbooks, five Potcake Chapbooks, and Nasty Women Poets.  She enjoys being a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine.  Her dream is to live in Oxfordshire, but failing that, almost any place in Western Europe would do.

“Catherine Howard” by Stifts- och landsbiblioteket i Skara is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: RHL, ‘An Observation’

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If particles only exist as waves,
precipitating out only when measured, seen,
till then just ghostly, nebulous, roughed-in…
If that’s the way the universe behaves,
then who’s to say the moons of Jupiter
existed before Galileo scoped
them out? Our simple world had coped,
pre-Hubbell, without needing to infer
a billion galaxies. Again, if things
newly observed are different than before,
then things that once were real are real no more,
especially nebulous, wave-form, with wings,
hence dragons, fairies, elves all now seem odd…
and angels, demons, giants, ghosts… and God.

*****

This sonnet was recently published in Bewildering Stories (thanks, Don Webb), and seems to have touched a chord with that issue’s theme of esse est percipi; so it leads off that week’s questions in the magazine:

  1. In Robin Helweg-Larsen’s An Observation:
    1. George Berkeley’s philosophy of Idealism is based upon the principle: “To be is to be perceived.” How does the theory of Quantum Physics support the principle of perception? Or does it?
    2. The poem concludes by listing a number of supernatural beings whose reality is implicitly denied as long as they have not been perceived. How does “God” differ — by definition — from the others in the list?
    3. By whom or what must something be perceived in order to exist? And how does a perception take place?

Photo: “Nebulous in Blue” by Toby Keller / Burnblue is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: sonnet variation: Amit Majmudar, ‘List of Demands’

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All the twists in all the tongues, all
the zeroes, all the ones, all the arms of all the goddesses, all
the names of the nameless and bodiless, all the ways the all-
one embodies, all at once, the alls there are, all
our alleles and alphabets, all the forms, yes all,
even the sestina, all our alternating lives and deaths, all
the kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, all
the peoples borderless as breaths, all the altars, all the all,

none of the zealots with knives for minds, none
of the wars, proxy, holy, shadow, cold, none
of the for-profit prophets in pulpits of gold, none
of the land grabs in the names of the long lost, none
of the one true anything, book or way or son, none
of that nonsense, absolutely none.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “The monorhymed sonnet (each line of the octet ending with the same word, each line of the sestet ending with another) is a chance to goad one’s creativity with a constraint just light enough. You have to come up with lines that stay interesting to the reader even though the reader knows how each line is going to end. In that, the line resembles, say, a formulaic genre novel where the hero gets the girl and defeats the villain at the end. Or one of Conan Doyle’s detective stories: You know that Holmes is going to solve the mystery. The number of characters is so low in a Holmes short story that the culprit has to be one of the few people introduced. But the delight is all in how he figures it out. Poems can work like that, too. The foregone conclusion of all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, none, none, none, none, none, none is the equivalent of the certainty that Holmes will crack the case. The internal rhymes and alliteration, the images, the poem’s message exalting pluralism over zealotry—these are, collectively, the equivalent of the mystery and the ingenious solution to the mystery, the Sherlock-unlock, the puzzle (hopefully) satisfyingly worked out.”

‘List of Demands’ was first published in Plume.

Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), and the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025). A new poetry collection, Things My Grandmother Said, is forthcoming in 2026. 
More information at www.amitmajmudar.com

Photo: “Inclusive community (citation needed) (2205859730)” by Matt Mechtley from Heidelberg, Deutschland is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: ‘Maz’ Griffiths, ‘Internal Memo’

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Dear Stomach,
… Look, we’ve really had enough.
Your job is simply to digest the stuff
supplied by Hands and Tongue, to move it through,
not chuck it up. Spurned food is déjà vu
and hurts Oesophagus; she’s frankly pissed,
and Face says please forget The Exorcist,
because projectile vomits are not fun
and bloody heartburn hacks off everyone.
Lungs say they’re worried by a niggling cough
and Guts say if you won’t perform: Sod off!
That’s not my phrase–I’m mediating here,
but want to stress the general atmosphere.

Please see these hiccups don’t occur again.
I sign myself, sincerely,
… Upper Brain

*****

Margaret Ann “Maz” Griffiths, born in 1947, suffered for years from a stomach ailment which finally killed her in 2009. Her frankness, good humour, range of interests and insights and her technical skill make her one of the very best English language poets of the early 21st century.

I recommend ‘Grasshopper‘, the 350-page compilation of her known verse, to anyone interested in modern poetry. It is one of those rare books that I reread every couple of years. I would be glad to hear of any more of her verse that has turned up since 2011.

Photo: By David Adkins – Scanned photo provided by David Adkins with permission for reuse, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16997441

SF poem: Don Webb, ‘Mars Draws Near’

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Do you know where now or in what lands
Are the voices that sang of vibrant Mars?
Of slender spires on iron-red sands
And canals, night-necklaces with stars?
They sang of visions that once seemed clear.
Who sings of the Mars of yesteryear?

Does sadness tinge new Eden’s rainbows
Or the sin-abrading void of space?
Close now, does Mars now close
Its alien, inviting face?
Today we hear triumphant fear.
Who hears the Mars of yesteryear?

Man, covet not the power of stones
Nor jails, nor ruins. Mars draws near.
It once gave flesh to now-dry bones:
Return to the Mars of yesteryear.

*****

Don Webb writes: “I wrote this poem in 2003. That happened to be a special time in astronomy, when Mars was closest to Earth. The ‘yesteryear’ reference was prompted by fond memories of the literature of Ray Bradbury and C.S. Lewis, among others.  The poem’s relevance to today’s world is explained in Bewildering Stories’ series of review articles: ‘Cassandra’s Voices: Warnings to the Modern Age‘  ( https://www.bewilderingstories.com/includes/toc/cassandra_toc.html). All of the works discussed shine important light on 21st-century civilization and continue to be of immediate interest in U.S. and world politics. The nostalgia of Mars invading Earth seems preferable to Trusk & Mump’s earthly imperialism and dreams of an Invasion of Mars.”

Don Webb is a teacher of French language and literature. B.A., Dartmouth College; Ph. D., University of Wisconsin. Major: French; minor: German. Thesis: Jean Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse. Most of his career was spent at California State University, Sacramento. Ten years moonlighting as a professional translator of French and Italian. He is currently retired and has taught an on-line course in French for Reading Comprehension for several years and, occasionally, French for Listening Comprehension at the University of Guelph, in Ontario.

For a more complete (and highly amusing) bio with reflections on the various people he has been mistaken for – and the doppelgänger who has been mistaken for him – visit www.bewilderingstories.com/bios/donbio.html

Photo: “Mars the Mysterious (NASA, 1997)” by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using form: Couplets/Sonnet: Gail White, ‘Prayer Updated’

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To Anyone who still may be
attentive from Infinity,
we bless you from our dot in space
and thank you for our privileged place.

Give us this day on which to feed
a bit more gluten than we need,
and when we’re adequately fed,
help us to get and stay ahead
and save for our retirement
enough plus twenty-five per cent.

May old age find us cheerful still,
our life in order like our will,
with neither pain nor care nor debt.
Thy kingdom come, but not just yet.

*****

Gail White writes: “Religion and irony are not incompatible I find that a good deal of poetry comes from taking a speculative or questioning view of Bible stories (e.g, how did Adam and Eve react to the murder of Abel by Cain? We don’t hear a peep out of them about it.) And I’ve often said that if God hadn’t wanted at least one cynical feminist poet, I wouldn’t exist.”

‘Prayer Updated’ was published in the current issue of Lighten Up Online.

Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her books ASPERITY STREET and CATECHISM and the chapbook SONNETS IN A HOSTILE WORLD are available on Amazon. She is a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine. “Tourist in India” won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for 2013. Her poems have appeared in the Potcake Chapbooks ‘Tourists and Cannibals’, ‘Rogues and Roses’, ‘Families and Other Fiascoes’, ‘Strip Down’ and ‘Lost Love’.

Illustration: “Global Prayer” by thorntonsdigital is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.