Category Archives: sonnets

Sonnet: Rick Mullin, ‘Shrine to Satan’

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The neighbor’s child has built a muddy shrine
to Satan in our yard. And I’m supposed
to cut the lawn? OK, but look at those
croquet clubs that she used (good God, they’re mine)
to pound her pentagrams of chicken bone
into the ground. The handles are unscrewed
from all the hammer heads. It’s kind of shrewd
the way she placed that PlayskoolTM telephone.

Still, little girls should not touch garden tools
or take the plastic rake out of the shed–
she’s tied it with those jump ropes to the tree.
A shattered flower pot. The Barbie head.
Horrific how this child has learned the rules
of Belial for sculpting in debris.

*****

Rick Mullin writes: “The little girl, A., is a friend of our family and was one of three girls that spent most days playing in our yard. One day they split up, each doing their own thing in their own corner of the yard. The Shrine to Satan, as I called it, was crafted by A. The architect of the horror described in this poem is getting married today.”

Rick Mullin’s poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including American Arts Quarterly, Measure, The New Criterion, The Dark Horse, The Raintown Review, Epiphany, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. ‘Shrine to Satan’ is from his chapbook “Aquinas Flinched”, Exot books, 2008. His books include Soutine and Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle (Dos Madres Press, 2012 and 2014), Lullaby and Wheel (Kelsay Books, 2019), and Huncke (second edition, Exot Books, 2021). He is a painter and retired journalist living in northern New Jersey. His website is rickmullin.com and his art blog is onlyofobjects.wordpress.com

Photo: “Little girl playing with a kitten and dolls.” by simpleinsomnia is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: Gail White, ‘A Visit on All Saints Day’

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Hello. I’ve brought your favorite flowers again.
How is going under there, my dead?
On this side, we’re no better off than when
you walked beside us. (Yes, I know I said
the same last year.) The human race is not
improvable. Ask any saint you meet.
We’ve gone to war again without a thought.
Our leaders shuffle bribes, our heroes cheat.
Your children haven’t turned out awfully well,
but who expected it? You’re not to blame.
They’ll manage, and nobody burns in hell.
Goodbye for now. I’m always glad I came.
I make no promises about next year,
but one way or another, I’ll be here.

*****

Gail White writes: “I wrote this while living in New Orleans, where the dead are buried above ground (mostly) because the city is below sea level.  All Saints Day is still a big deal, when the family tomb gets a new coat of whitewash and flowers are placed on every grave.  It’s time to reflect on family and faith and our all ending up in the same place, as I’ve tried to do here.”

Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her books ASPERITY STREET and CATECHISM 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’. ‘A Visit on All Saints Day’ was originally published in Mezzo Cammin, and collected in her chapbook, ‘Sonnets in a Hostile World‘, also available on Amazon.

Photo: “New Orleans Cemetery DUVERHAY tomb” by Infrogmation of New Orleans is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Poem on poetry: Sonnet: Marcus Bales, ‘White Water’

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A poem is so obdurate and small
Compared to what you wanted it to say
And sometimes isn’t even close at all.
For instance, this. I’ve worked on it all day,
A metaphor for all of love’s affairs.
I failed to ride the energy it gave,
My form and balance gone. Nothing prepares
You for the wildness of the standing wave.
Possessing and possessed and then propelled
Abruptly past the point of no control
To merely peril, having once beheld
The moving stillness of it all, all whole.
Your head’s what every poem wants to split,
While you stroke hard to stay ahead of it.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “My online pal, the poet Liam Guilar, was a kayak adventurer, sneaking across borders to paddle the most dangerous rivers in the world. I went white water rafting once. You’re stuck in cold, wet, awkward positions that often turn suddenly painful. Why people do it over and over seems not just unreasonable but cold, wet, and painful. There are exhilarating moments, but you’re still cold, wet, and out of control. I could feel in my one experience that the out of controlness might be the point. Still, it was wet and cold. Very wet. Very cold. 

“The confluence of Liam’s many tales, my paltry experience, and he and I both struggling to write poems is the impetus for this poem. I’ve often thought that maybe what it needs is a bucket of ice water suspended over the reader like a, well, like a bucket of Damocles, that sloshes over the head and down the back of the neck in order to make it work.”

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: “Kayaking through the white waters of the Gorge” by Grand River Conservation Authority is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using form: William Trowbridge, ‘Song of the Black Hole’

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radially extracted by NASA

You can almost see Vincent Price, black-robed,
hunched above the console of a jumbo organ
in the bowels of his creaky haunted manse; or
maybe a stadium of damned souls, strobed
in lurid red and howling nettle-robed
as they plummet into Pandemonium, pore
and pith aflame. It’s no troubadour,
undoubtedly, this vast atonal gob.

As with the Roach Motel, we’d check in,
but never out—us or anything, since
it can swallow errant planets whole, and still,
however much the mass, can’t eat its fill.
Though it’s larger far than Jupiter or Mars,
we can barely see it, thank our lucky stars.

*****

 William Trowbridge writes in Rattle, where this poem was published: “I’ve spent most of my years as a poet writing free verse, though lately I find myself turning toward form. Unlike those who see formalist verse as dry and effete, I find it can generate power by means of barriers to play against—‘the net’ as Frost put it, by which he also meant boundary lines. If you pour gunpowder in a pile and light it, a mere flash occurs. But pack it tightly into a container, and you can get something more powerful. And, as opposed to the notion that form is restrictive, I agree with Richard Wilbur that it often liberates one from choosing the easy word in order to discover the better, surprising one. I haven’t moved into this part of town yet, but I stop there more and more.”

William Trowbridge’s tenth poetry collection, Father and Son, was published by Wayne
State College Press Press in April. His poems have appeared in more than 45
anthologies and textbooks, as well as on The Writer’s Almanac, AnAmerican Life in
Poetry, and in such periodicals as Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review,
The Southern Review, Plume, Rattle, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, and
New Letters. He is a mentor in the University of Nebraska-Omaha Low-residency MFA
in Writing Program and was Poet Laureate of Missouri from 2012 to 2016. For more
information, see his website, williamtrowbridge.net.

YouTube: Data Sonification: Black Hole at the Center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster (X-ray), NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

Sonnet: Richard Fleming, ‘Sunny Afternoon’

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Book discarded, like excess baggage shed
by someone who has rapidly pushed on
into uncharted regions far ahead,
he sleeps in an old deck chair on the lawn.
Gulls circle, skaters on an ice-blue lake,
while he dreams on, oblivious, his face
unshaded by a hat which, when awake,
he wears with equanimity and grace.
What does he dream? Is the unreal more real
than those pale gulls that spiral high above?
In sleep, has youth returned? No longer frail,
does he relive time when impatient love
was everything and all his heart desired,
before life tricked him, left him old and tired?

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “I suppose Sunny Afternoon reflects my own station in life, that is, drifting steadily towards the end, with the usual collection of regrets that most of us have.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

Photo: posted by Richard Fleming

Sonnet: Eric McHenry, ‘Lives of the Poets’

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They rubbed two sticks together and made friction.
They made a fist but couldn’t make a hand.
Their dictionary wasn’t made of diction.
Their diction made them hard to understand.

Trying to make a poem, they made a list.
Trying to make the team, they made the choir.
They made up stories whose protagonist
would rub two sticks together and make fire.

Mistakes were made, and mixtapes to go with them.
They made a couch their bed and made their bed.
They tried to make a joke at the expense
of love and money. “Make me,” money said.
They made up stories but they made no sense.
They rubbed two cents together and made rhythm.

*****

Eric McHenry writes: “Strangely, I remember almost nothing about writing this poem, except that I was thinking about the etymology of ‘poet’ (‘maker’) and about the versatility of the verb ‘make’.”

‘Lives of the Poets’ was first published in Literary Matters.

Eric McHenry is a professor of English at Washburn University and a past poet laureate of Kansas. His books of poetry include Odd Evening, a finalist for the Poets’ Prize; Potscrubber Lullabies, which received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and Mommy Daddy Evan Sage, a collection of children’s poems illustrated by Nicholas Garland. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife and two children.
Eric McHenry – The Waywiser Press
Eric McHenry, Author at The American Scholar

Photo: “Master Sacha twirls the fire stick” by one thousand years is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Communication Breakdown’

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I love you with that love floppy and large,
As one of us a man – the other, dog;
Involved, detached, our life’s a travelogue
Of countrysides seen from a rented barge,
“Travels With You” along some river’s marge,
Failing at interspecies dialogue
Till tries at talk are lost in night and fog,
Drifting with batteries we can’t recharge.

Yet there’s no option but to travel on,
Each varied day no different than before,
Wondering if we’ll find some magic door
Which, risking entry, gives communion;
And if, by talking, love would be enhanced,
Or if we’d then destroy all we have chanced.

*****

Sonnet originally published in Candelabrum in 2007.

Photo: “Accordion player” by eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Using form: Spenserian sonnet: Charles Martin, ‘On the Problem of Bears’

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Bears are frustrated by their lack of speech,
Their claws leave blackboards shrieking for repairs,
And that’s why bears are seldom asked to teach
And almost never get Distinguished Chairs
Unless they come across one unawares
Whose rich upholstery they quickly shred.
Some of them have been known to have affairs
With a man or woman lured into their bed—
This often ends up badly with one dead,
The other executed for the crime,
Or given a life sentence in a zoo.
Bears are familiar with existential dread,
Bears put their pants on one leg at a time:
The problems bears have are your problems too.

*****

Charles Martin writes: “The poem is written in a variation on the Spenserian Sonnet form, which I have been writing for several years now. In this case, I enjoy the contrast between the strictness of the form and the raucousness of its subject. As I recall, I began it on a morning walk, and I think finished it shortly after the walk ended. 

“The poem will next appear in The Khayyam Suite this spring, published by The Johns Hopkin University Press, which has published my last two collections of poetry, Signs & Wonders and Future Perfect, both of which are still in print. (Future Perfect has a sonnet sequence written in the Spenserian form.) Poems have recently been published in Literary Matters, The Hudson Review, Classical Outlook, and in Best American Poetry, 2024.”

Charles Martin is a poet, translator of poetry, and essayist. The Khayyam Suite is the fifth of his eight books of poetry to appear in the Fiction and Poetry Series of the Johns Hopkins University Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, The Hopkins Review and, in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Ingram Merrill Grant, a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry magazine, and a Pushcart Prize. His residencies include the Djerassi Foundation and Ragdale, and he served as Poet in Residence for five years for the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. His translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses received the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets, and he has also translated The Poems of Catullus and the Medea of Euripides. He is the author of the critical introduction to Catullus in the Hermes Book series of Yale University Press and of numerous essays on, and reviews of, classical and contemporary poetry.

Photo: from the Bantam/Seal cover of Marian Engle’s novel ‘Bear’, referenced in https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/why-the-classic-canadian-novel-bear-remains-controversial-and-relevant-1.5865107

Using form: Sonnet: Jenna Le, ‘Purses’

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When our Quiz Bowl team of eighteen-year-olds snagged
a berth in the finals, held in New York City,

my small-town Minnesotan brain cells dizzied—
at last I’d be some place that mattered. Swag

was my teammate Anne’s fixation: knockoff bags
peddled in Chinatown, affixed with glitzy

Kate Spade labels. Anne bought a sack of six,
then forgot it on the airport shuttle’s shag

seats; someone swiped it within minutes. Kate,
I learned a fact of womanhood that year:

even we knockoff girls, cheap, desperate
to look like someone else, to imitate

a finer woman, have our value; we’re
wanted, wanted, until we disappear.

*****

Jenna Le writes: “The anecdote narrated in the first ten lines of the poem poured out of me easily and naturally enough. It was an anecdote that had been knocking around inside my brain for many years, but it wasn’t until I sat down to write the poem that the incident’s metaphorical meaning — that is, the epiphany contained in the poem’s last four lines — seemed to crystallize in the air in front of my eyes — and, to me, made the whole poem worthwhile. Honestly, until I sat down to write the poem, it had never even occurred to me that such a slight-seeming anecdote might have any metaphorical meaning at all. I sat down to write the poem more or less on a lark, and then the sonnet form just sort of took over and forced me to look deeper, to see more depth in my own material. This is one of the reasons I love the sonnet form.”

Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022), the last of which is the collection in which “Purses” appears and which can be purchased here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo185843950.html

Photo: “DIY Kate Spade Owl Purse” by Stacie Stacie Stacie is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Weekend read: Sonnet variation: Michael R. Burch, ‘Erin’

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All that’s left of Ireland is her hair—
bright carrot—and her milkmaid-pallid skin,
her brilliant air of cavalier despair,
her train of children—some conceived in sin,
the others to avoid it. For nowhere
is evidence of thought. Devout, pale, thin,
gay, nonchalant, all radiance. So fair!

How can men look upon her and not spin
like wobbly buoys churned by her skirt’s brisk air?
They buy. They grope to pat her nyloned shin,
to share her elevated, pale Despair …
to find at last two spirits ease no one’s.

All that’s left of Ireland is the Care,
her impish grin, green eyes like leprechauns’.

*****

Michael R. Burch writes: “My poem is set in the present and really has nothing to do with poverty. All that’s left of Ireland of yore is the young mother’s red hair, fair skin, a tendency toward melancholy (“despair), and her train of children. She’s a practicing Catholic except for a few affairs. Otherwise she’s a modern woman, drinking and flirting in a pub. I was trying to capture a bit of Ireland in a young mother, very loosely inspired by one of my Irish cousins who was a bit of a “wild child” in her youth.”

(Editor’s aside: My bad for thinking that “All that’s left” implied poverty, which was not in Michael R. Burch’s mind at all. True, Ireland goes through enormous swings of fortune, but the Ireland of even some years ago no longer matches the fabulously rich Ireland of today – the people are 50% richer than Americans or Norwegians…

2024 top GDP.png

… putting the UAE and Switzerland in the shade as well.)

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into 22 languages, incorporated into three plays and four operas, and set to music, from swamp blues to classical, 61 times by 32 composers. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts.

Photo: “Irish Fire at the Barn” by Trey Ratcliff is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.