With apologies for the meter, rhyme, and scansion.

The Sunday Sonnet deadline's drawing near,

And yet I cannot find a thing to post.

The sonnet is a form that I hold dear,

The subjects, though, are what I hate the most.

From Petrarch down on through Louis MacNeice

They deal with death and loss and sorrow, too.

I'd like to read a cheery one, at least,

Or something silly. Is that hard to do?

Sing me a song of puppies! Sing of shoes!

Write lines about the bathroom being clean!

For God's sake, you have nothing there to lose

If, for once, you're cheerful. Don't be mean.

But not one sonnet will throw me a bone,

And so I sigh, and shrug, and write my own.

Sunday Sonnet: Special Edition

Susan Palwick, over at Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good, writes the best blog I have ever read through tears. She makes me both want to write and stop writing.

Bed 5.1

Room five’s for criticals, and has four beds.
The only room that’s scarier is 2,
though many patients here go home instead
of being brought upstairs, to ICU.
This corner’s where I first saw someone dead.
We’d prayed; her voice had vanished, but I knew
from her expression what she would have said
could she have spoken: “Help me. Help me! Do
you understand?” A dying cat once stared
at me like that. I held her hands and prayed;
she struggled less. But later when I went
to check on her, the patient wasn’t there:
a cold corpse lay, eyes open and afraid,
fixed face a mute mask of abandonment.

Sunday Sonnet

Edna St. Vincent Millay

V

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again --
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man -- who happened to be you --
At noon to-day had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud -- I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place --
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.