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From: gmf@uvacs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.poems
Subject: Sonnet addiction
Message-ID: <1231@uvacs.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 8-Apr-84 23:02:45 EST
Article-I.D.: uvacs.1231
Posted: Sun Apr  8 23:02:45 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Apr-84 07:19:41 EST
Lines: 50


Are there any people on the net besides me who are addicted to sonnets?
Here's one by John Ciardi (published by him in 1979):



                          For Instance

               A boy came up the street and there was a girl.
               "Hello," they said in passing, then didn't pass.
               They began to imagine.  They imagined all night
               and woke imagining what the other imagined.
               Later they woke with no need to imagine.
               They were together.  They kept waking together.
               Once they woke a daughter who got up
               and went looking for something without looking back.
               But they had one another.  Then one of them died.
               It makes no difference which.  Either.  The other
               tried to imagine dying, and couldn't really,
               but died later, maybe to find out,
               though probably not.  Not everything that happens
               is a learning experience.  Maybe nothing is.

                              -- John Ciardi


Admittedly gloomy.  Here's a more traditional one (rhymed, strict
iambic pentameter), not so gloomy, which I wrote about 3 years ago:


                          when we were young

               remember love when we were young and where
               insistent to each other we would be
               incorporate in gritty ecstasy
               on fields of moon and we were lovelike there
               and inside when we lay we could outwear
               the night and listen to the strategy
               of banging freight cars being joined while we
               set voyages of which we weren't aware

               no greater mystery excepting death
               will penetrate our days and make fulfill
               the monuments of flesh in which we care
               until the day we break our beating breath
               and time must discontain us waiting still
               remember love when we were young and where


     Gordon Fisher (...!uvacs!gmf)