Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Immortal Heat, O let Thy greater flame
Attract the lesser to it; let those fires
Which shall consume the world first make it tame,
And kindle in our hearts such true desires.
As may consume our lusts, and make Thee way:
Then shall our hearts pant Thee, then shall our brain
All her invention on Thine altar lay,
And there in hymns send back Thy fire again.
Our eyes shall see Thee, which before saw dust,
Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blind:
Thou shalt recover all Thy goods in kind,
Who wert disseized by usurping lust:
All knees shall bow to Thee; all wits shall rise,
And praise Him Who did make and mend our eyes.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Beside a humble stone, a tree
Floats in the cemetery’s air,
Not planted in memoriam there,
But growing wild, uncultured, free.
A bird comes perching there to sing,
Winter and summer, proffering
Its faithful song—sad, bittersweet.
That tree, that bird are you and I:
You, memory; absence, me, that tide
And time record. Ah, by your side
To live again, undying! Aye,
To live again! But ma petite,
Now nothingness, cold, owns my flesh. . .
Will your love keep my memory fresh?


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I see you shuffle up Washington Street
whenever I am driving much too fast:
you, chub & bug-eyed, jaw like a loaf
hands in your pockets, a smoke dangling slack
from the slit of your pumpkin mouth,
humped over like the eel-man or geek,
the dummy paid to sweep out gutters,
drown the cats. Where are you going now?
Though someday you'll turn your gaze
upon my shadow in this tinted glass
I know for now you only look ahead
at sidewalks cracked & paved with trash
but what are you slouching toward—knee-locked,
hippity, a hitch in your zombie walk, Bighead?


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse,
And found such fair assistance in my verse
As every alien pen hath got my use
And under thee their poesy disperse.
Thine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
Have added feathers to the learned’s wing
And given grace a double majesty.
Yet be most proud of that which I compile,
Whose influence is thine, and born of thee:
In others’ works thou dost but mend the style,
And arts with thy sweet graces graced be;
But thou art all my art, and dost advance
As high as learning, my rude ignorance.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Getting the child to bed is awful work,
Committing that rage to sleep that will not sleep.
The lie rots in my throat saying, “O.K.
There is balm in Gilead. Go to bed.
Honey of generation has betrayed us both.”
And truly it is no wild surmise of darkness
Nor Pisgah purview of Canaan drowned in blood
But only my child saying its say in bed.
If madness ever covers me, the caul contract
That now but loosely insinuates a shroud
I shall go howling into the conscious grave
(God keep children from the power of the dog)
Follow that note into the uttering horn
Awake in the womb from which I was born.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I
One day as she rinsed her wash from the jetty,
the bay's cold grave rose up through her arms
and into her life.
Her tears froze into spectacles.
The island raised itself by its grass
and the herring-flag waved in the deep.
II
And the swarm of small pox caught up with him,
settled down onto his face.
He lies and stares at the ceiling.
How it had rowed up through the silence.
The now's eternally flowing stain,
the now's eternally bleeding end-point.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
The trouble with paradise is you never want to be away from home.
I make what calls me out.
All gone before you know it.
Words may drop passing color yet seeing you here now are born again, and again.
Closing a word in the mouth feels the sound until the tongue can't stay still.
To unmask is to go silent.
Language makes no promise to communicate.
An articulated sound has its own dream in the ear.
Her presence in the room gives aroma to the syllables I voice.
Now she's ready to draw eros from foreign bodies.
It starts by focusing on the sounds beyond hearing, still felt.
By she I mean who speaking animate configures.
This is the time of alternative obscurities to see through.
Through thoroughly, as a word weighs.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Not your ordinary ice cream, though the glaze
of these skeletal figures affects
the disposition of those grinning candies
one finds in Mexico, say, at the start of November,
though here, each face is troublingly familiar,
exhibits the style adopted just as one declines
any further style—nectar one sips just as he
draws his last, dispassionate breath, becomes
citizen of a less earnest electorate. One learns
in that city finally how to enjoy a confection,
even if a genuine taste for this circumstance
has yet to be acquired, even if it is oneself
whose sugars and oils now avail a composure
which promises never to end, nor to alter.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Even before I saw the chambered nautilus
I wanted to sail not in the us navy
Tonight I'm waiting for you, your letter
At the same time his letter, the view of you
By him and then by me in the park, no rhymes
I saw you, this is in prose, no it's not
Sitting with the molluscs & anemones in an
Empty autumn enterprise baby you look pretty
With your long eventual hair, is love king?
What's this? A sonnet? Love's a babe we know that
I'm coming up, I'm coming, Shakespeare only stuck
To one subject but I'll mention nobody said
You have to get young Americans some ice cream
In the artificial light in which she woke


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Alas, so all things now do hold their peace!
Heaven and earth disturbèd in no thing;
The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease,
The nightès car the stars about doth bring;
Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less:
So am not I, whom love, alas! doth wring,
Bringing before my face the great increase
Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing,
In joy and woe, as in a doubtful case.
For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring:
But by and by, the cause of my disease
Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,
When that I think what grief it is again
To live and lack the thing should rid my pain.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
She had turned her face up into
a rain of light, and came on smiling.
The light trickled down her forehead
and into her eyes. It ran down
into the neck of her sweatshirt
and wet the white tops of her breasts.
Her brown shoes splashed on
into the light. The moment was like
a circus wagon rolling before her
through puddles of light, a cage on wheels,
and she walked fast behind it,
exuberant, curious, pushing her cane
through the bars, poking and prodding,
while the world cowered back in a corner.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
In the aftermath of calculus
your toast fell butter-side down.
Squirrels swarmed the lawns
in flight patterns. The hovercraft
helped the waves along. From
every corner there was perspective.
On the billboards the diamonds
were real, in the stores, only zirconia.
I cc’ed you. I let you know.
Sat down to write the Black Ice Memo.
Dinner would be meager &
reminiscent of next week’s lunch.
So what if I sat on the sectional?
As always I was beside myself.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
I spied everything. The North Dakota license,
the “Baby on Board” signs, dead raccoons, and deer carcasses.
The Garfields clinging to car windows—the musky traces of old coffee.
I was single-minded in the buzz saw tour I took through
the flatlands of the country to get home. I just wanted to get there.
Never mind the antecedent. I had lost stations miles ago
and was living on cassettes and caffeine. Ahead, brushstrokes
of smoke from annual fires. Only ahead to the last days of summer
and to the dying theme of youth. How pitch-perfect
the tire-on-shoulder sound was to mask the hiss of the tape deck ribbons.
Everything. Perfect. As Wyoming collapses over the car
like a wave. And then another mile marker. Another.
How can I say this more clearly? It was like opening a heavy book,
letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I remember them saying,
these poems, their something
for someone at sometime
for me too, at one time.
That got in the way;
so I sent them away
back into history—
just temporarily.
They won’t come back now.
I can’t remember how
the words spoke, or what
they said,
except:
We are all dead


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,
As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel;
For well thou know’st to my dear doting heart
Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel.
Yet, in good faith, some say that thee behold,
Thy face hath not the power to make love groan;
To say they err I dare not be so bold,
Although I swear it to myself alone.
And to be sure that is not false I swear,
A thousand groans, but thinking on thy face,
One on another’s neck, do witness bear
Thy black is fairest in my judgement’s place.
In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,
And thence this slander, as I think, proceeds.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Come, fallen angel, and your pink wings close;
Doff your white robe, your rays that gild the skies;
You must—from heaven, where once you used to rise—
Streak, like a shooting star, fall into prose.
Your bird’s feet now must strike an earthly pose.
It is no time to fly: walk! Lock your prize—
Your harp’s fair harmonies—in resting wise,
Within your heart: vain, worthless treasures those!
Poor child of heaven, but vainly would you sing:
To them your tongue divine means not a thing!
Their ear is closed to your sweet chords! But this
I beg: O blue-eyed angel, first, before
You leave, find my pale love, whom I adore,
And give her brow one long, last farewell kiss.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness;
Some say thy grace is youth and gentle sport;
Both grace and faults are lov’d of more and less:
Thou mak’st faults graces that to thee resort.
As on the finger of a throned queen
The basest jewel will be well esteem’d,
So are those errors that in thee are seen
To truths translated, and for true things deem’d.
How many lambs might the stern wolf betray,
If like a lamb he could his looks translate!
How many gazers mightst thou lead away,
If thou wouldst use the strength of all thy state!
But do not so; I love thee in such sort,
As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,
As once Electra her sepulchral urn,
And, looking in thine eyes, I over-turn
The ashes at thy feet.  Behold and see
What a great heap of grief lay hid in me,
And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn
Through the ashen greyness.  If thy foot in scorn
Could tread them out to darkness utterly,
It might be well perhaps.  But if instead
Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow
The grey dust up, . . . those laurels on thine head,
O my Belovëd, will not shield thee so,
That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred
The hair beneath.  Stand further off then! go!


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument,
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Pardon, oh, pardon, that my soul should make
Of all that strong divineness which I know
For thine and thee, an image only so
Formed of the sand, and fit to shift and break.
It is that distant years which did not take
Thy sovranty, recoiling with a blow,
Have forced my swimming brain to undergo
Their doubt and dread, and blindly to forsake
Thy purity of likeness and distort
Thy worthiest love to a worthless counterfeit.
As if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port,
His guardian sea-god to commemorate,
Should set a sculptured porpoise, gills a-snort
And vibrant tail, within the temple-gate.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
I would have been as great as George Eliot But for an untoward fate.
For look at the photograph of me made by Peniwit,
Chin resting on hand, and deep-set eyes i Gray, too, and far-searching.
But there was the old, old problem:
Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity?
Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me,
Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel,
And I married him, giving birth to eight children,
And had no time to write.
It was all over with me, anyway,
When I ran the needle in my hand While washing the baby's things,
And died from lock-jaw, an ironical death.
Hear me, ambitious souls,
Sex is the curse of life!


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Or whether doth my mind, being crown’d with you,
Drink up the monarch’s plague, this flattery?
Or whether shall I say, mine eye saith true,
And that your love taught it this alchemy,
To make of monsters and things indigest
Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble,
Creating every bad a perfect best,
As fast as objects to his beams assemble?
O! ’tis the first, ’tis flattery in my seeing,
And my great mind most kingly drinks it up:
Mine eye well knows what with his gust is ’greeing,
And to his palate doth prepare the cup:
If it be poison’d, ’tis the lesser sin
That mine eye loves it and doth first begin.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
’Tis to yourself I speak; you cannot know
Him whom I call in speaking such an one,
For thou beneath the earth lie buried low,
Which he alone as living walks upon;
Thou mayst at times have heard him speak to you,
And often wished perchance that you were he;
And I must ever wish that it were true,
For then thou couldst hold fellowship with me;
But now thou hear’st us talk as strangers, met
Above the room wherein thou liest abed;
A word perhaps loud spoken thou mayst get,
Or hear our feet when heavily they tread;
But he who speaks, or him who’s spoken to,
Must both remain as strangers still to you.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Several of my cousins lean up against the house, taking long drags
from the pack of Marlboros we share. We have always been this way
—addicted and generous. A pow wow tape plays from inside the open
garage where two old uncles are thinking to themselves in the safety
of its shadows. Our aunties are in the kitchen, preparing the boiled meat
and chokecherry soup and laughing about old jokes they still hang onto
because these things are a matter of survival. Outside, we ask about
who was driving around with who last night, where so-and-so got beat
up, whose girlfriend left him for someone else. (But she’ll go back to
him, we all think to ourselves.) Aunties carry the full pots and pans to the
picnic table, an uncle prays over our food in Assiniboine. We all want to
forget that we don’t understand this language, we spend lots of time
trying to forget in different ways. No one notices that the wild turnips
are still simmering in a pot on the stove.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Penelope for her Ulisses sake,
Deviz’d a Web her wooers to deceave:
In which the worke that she all day did make
The same at night she did again unreave:
Such subtile craft my Damzell doth conceave,
Th’ importune suit of my desire to shonne:
For all that I in many dayes doo weave,
In one short houre I find by her undonne.
So when I thinke to end that I begonne,
I must begin and never bring to end:
For with one looke she spils that long I sponne,
And with one word my whole years work doth rend.
Such labour like the Spyders web I fynd,
Whose fruitless worke is broken with least wynd.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.
Nay,
I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath,
When, his pulse failing,
Passion speechless lies;
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes— Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might’st him yet recover!


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Mute is thy wild harp, now,
O Bard sublime!
Who, amid Scotia’s mountain solitude,
Great Nature taught to “build the lofty rhyme,”
And even beneath the daily pressure, rude,
Of laboring Poverty, thy generous blood,
Fired with the love of freedom—Not subdued
Wert thou by thy low fortune:
But a time
Like this we live in, when the abject chime Of echoing Parasite is best approved,
Was not for thee—Indignantly is fled Thy noble Spirit; and no longer moved
By all the ills o’er which thine heart has bled,
Associate worthy of the illustrious dead,
Enjoys with them “the Liberty it loved.”


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Oh fairest of the rural maids!
Thy birth was in the forest shades;
Green boughs, and glimpses of the sky,
Were all that met thine infant eye.
Thy sports, thy wanderings, when a child,
Were even in the sylvan wild;
And all the beauty of the place Is in thy heart and on thy face.
The twilight of the trees and rocks Is in the light shade of thy locks;
Thy step is as the wind, that weaves Its playful way among the leaves.
Thine eyes are springs, in whose serene And silent waters heaven is seen;
Their lashes are the herbs that look On their young figures in the brook.
The forest depths, by foot unpressed,
Are not more sinless than thy breast;
The holy peace, that fills the air Of those calm solitudes, is there.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
I have hidden your lost teeth in the net of all my famous hair
And with foresight promised your umbilicus
To several minor gods. I paid your fee in fawn skin
& the lightest fringe of tissue, all the quiet noons assembled,
In yard stars & the light of phosphorescent pens,
The dioramas that it takes to fill lacunae, in ancestral knots
That tell the story of our humble people: watchmakers,
Mainly, ventriloquists & scholars of quintessence,
Amateur lifeguards I meant to surpass. How I loved
My green & distant futures! But I love you more
From late Holocene out to the farthest buoy, unto
Blackmail & a verb that means renouncing Christ
Or else describes the path of sap before it’s amber,
Before it dimples, just a little, to collect —


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Plows have piled a whitened range—
faux mountains at the end of our street,
slopes shrinking, glazed, grayed. Fog
rules the day. In woolly air, shapes
stir—slow cars leave a trace
of exhaust, careful walkers share
loud intimacies. My mother's birth
slides across a calendar. Like
a stranger who jumps off a bus,
crosses tracks and strides toward us,
memory parts the sodden gloom
of our winter, as though, today,
only she can see where she
goes and track where she's been.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bettering of the time,
And though they be outstripp'd by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
"Had my friend's Muse grown with this growing age
A dearer birth than this his love had brought,
To march in ranks of better equipage:
But since he died and poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love."


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
I once carried my mollusk tune
All the way to the lottery of gods.
Rain was the old funeral choir
That keened of a hemisphere
Moored under lampwings.
Clouds never left. I knew
The lights would shine clearer
If I closed my eyes, just as
I knew the Pacific would teach
Me to sleep before tying my
Name to the flaming. Here I
Am now at the end of amethyst,
Drizzling another lost sunrise
Inside the quilt of your hand.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
for Jim Schley
The umbrella, in this case;
Earlier, the stool, the
Wooden pillars that hold up
the roof.
This guy, you realize,
Will dance with anything—
—He likes the idea.
Then he picks up some lady’s discarded sandals,
Holds them next to his head like sea shells,
Donkey ears.
Nothing,
his body states,
Is safe from the dance of ideas!


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Alack! what poverty my Muse brings forth,
That having such a scope to show her pride,
The argument, all bare, is of more worth
Than when it hath my added praise beside!
O! blame me not, if I no more can write!
Look in your glass, and there appears a face
That over-goes my blunt invention quite,
Dulling my lines, and doing me disgrace.
Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,
To mar the subject that before was well?
For to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell;
And more, much more, than in my verse can sit,
Your own glass shows you when you look in it.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
The giant world
is no damned genius
with its basket of latitude,
its schedule for wanting
to be touched.
Now, slow asleep
I’m song
to break in on,
a strength less lost
than gone.
I borrow minute, hour,
day, day.
The waves as cruel replacements pass
for crutches.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.
By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Like people
emerging from a steambath,
bending over,
steaming from their heads
and shoulders,
the ring of the mountains
from the Chilkat Range
to the Juneau ice field
as if in steambath towels
of snow flurries;
at their feet
are foaming white caps of sea
like water thrown on rocks
steaming from the heat.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
What was it like, God of mine, what was it like?
—Oh unfaithful heart, indecisive intelligence!
Was it like the going by of the wind?
Like the disappearance of the spring?
As nimble, as changeable, as weightless
as milkweed seeds in summer . . . Yes! Indefinite
as a smile which is lost forever in a laugh . . .
Arrogant in the air, just like a flag!
Flag, smile, milkweed pod, swift
spring in June, clear wind! . . .
Your celebration was so wild, so sad!
All of your changes ended up in nothing—
remembrance, a blind bee of bitter things!—
I don’t know what you were like, but you were!


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
the winged thang built her dream palace
amid the fine green eyes of a sheltering bough
she did not know it was urban turf
disguised as serenely delusionally rural
nor did she know the neighborhood was rife
with slant-mawed felines and those long-taloned
swoopers of prey. she was ignorant of the acidity & oil
that slowly polluted the earth, and was never
to detect the serpent coiled one strong limb below
following her nature she flitted and dove
for whatever blades twigs and mud
could be found under the humming blue
and created a hatchery for her spawn
not knowing all were doomed


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
O my Love sent me a lusty list,
Did not compare me to a summer's day
Wrote not the beauty of mine eyes
But catalogued in a pretty detailed
And comprehensive way the way(s)
In which he was better than me.
"More capable of extra- and inter-
Polation. More well-traveled -rounded multi-
Lingual! More practiced in so many matters
More: physical, artistic, musical,
Politic(al) academic (I dare say!) social
(In many ways!) and (ditto!) sexual!”
And yet these mores undid but his own plea(s)(e)
And left, none-the-less, the Greater Moor of me.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Pity me not because the light of day
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by;
Pity me not the waning of the moon,
Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,
Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.
This have I known always: Love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales:
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Music of Japan. Parsimoniously
from the water clock the drops unfold
in lazy honey or ethereal gold
that over time reiterates a weave
eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright.
I fear that every one will be the last.
They are a yesterday come from the past.
But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight
garden, what vigils by an unknown sea,
and from what modest melancholy, from
what lost and rediscovered afternoon
do they arrive at their far future: me?
Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play
I am. I want to be. I bleed away.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silvered o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made my self a motley to the view,
Gor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new;
Most true it is, that I have look’d on truth
Askance and strangely; but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays prov’d thee my best of love.
Now all is done, save what shall have no end:
Mine appetite I never more will grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend,
A god in love, to whom I am confin’d.
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
in the beginning
there was no end
the ground we
walked on was
a memory
our shadows
false stories
our clothing
space without time
darkness was the
color of angels
and the stars did
not weep
2.25.98


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise."
"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew."


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Not for that city of the level sun,
Its golden streets and glittering gates ablaze—
The shadeless, sleepless city of white days,
White nights, or nights and days that are as one—
We weary, when all is said , all thought, all done.
We strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see
What, from the threshold of eternity
We shall step into. No, I think we shun
The splendour of that everlasting glare,
The clamour of that never-ending song.
And if for anything we greatly long,
It is for some remote and quiet stair
Which winds to silence and a space for sleep
Too sound for waking and for dreams too deep.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Ah! wherefore with infection should he live,
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve,
And lace itself with his society?
Why should false painting imitate his cheek,
And steel dead seeming of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
Why should he live, now Nature bankrupt is,
Beggar’d of blood to blush through lively veins?
For she hath no exchequer now but his,
And proud of many, lives upon his gains.
O! him she stores, to show what wealth she had
In days long since, before these last so bad.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Turn,
Fortune, turn thy wheel, and lower the proud;
Turn thy wild wheel thro' sunshine, storm, and cloud;
Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.
Turn,
Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown;
With that wild wheel we go not up or down;
Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great.
Smile and we smile, the lords of many lands;
Frown and we smile, the lords of our own hands;
For man is man and master of his fate.
Turn, turn thy wheel above the staring crowd;
Thy wheel and thou are shadows in the cloud;
Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took,
And each doth good turns now unto the other:
When that mine eye is famish’d for a look,
Or heart in love with sighs himself doth smother,
With my love’s picture then my eye doth feast,
And to the painted banquet bids my heart;
Another time mine eye is my heart’s guest,
And in his thoughts of love doth share a part:
So, either by thy picture or my love,
Thyself away, art present still with me;
For thou not farther than my thoughts canst move,
And I am still with them, and they with thee;
Or, if they sleep, thy picture in my sight
Awakes my heart, to heart’s and eye’s delight.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
After her pills the girl slept and counted
Pellet on pellet the regress of life.
Dead to the world, the world's count yet counted
Pellet on pill the antinomies of life.
Refused to turn, the way's back, she counted
Her several stones across the mire of life.
And stones away and sticks away she counted
To keep herself out of the country of life.
Lost tally. How the sheep return to home
Is the story she will retrieve
And the only story believe
Of one and one the sheep returning home
To take the shapes of life,
Coming and being counted.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
In the past we listened to photographs. They heard our voice speak.
Alive, active. What had been distance was memory.    Dusk came,
Pushed us forward,   emptying the laboratory   each night undisturbed by
Erasure.
In the city of X, they lived together. Always morose, her lips
soothed him. The piano was arranged in the old manner, light entered the
window, street lamps at the single tree.
Emotion evoked by a single light on a subject is not transferable to
photographs of the improved city. The camera, once
commented freely amid rivering and lost gutters of treeless parks or avenue.
The old camera refused to penetrate the unknown. Its heart was soft,
unreliable.
Now distributed is photography of new government building. We are
forbidden to observe despair silent in old photographs.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
because we know distance too well
because the blood bank didn’t have enough blood for nana & her new knee
because I see your car a car like yours parked across the street from my apartment
because the same night awaits us all
because arizona & the drought & I was seven when it started
because nana used to sleep with a belt tied around her waist so tight to wake like an hourglass
because I wait on you
because I want to know the antonym to every word
because we speak to each other in our sleep
because I do my best thinking in the shower so I take long showers
because you kiss the parts of my body I hate most
because you can love someone & not remember their birthday
because sometimes I want the wind & it is impossible
because from the airplane I can see both oceans & where they meet


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Dear one, the sea smells of nostalgia. We’re beached and bloated, lie
on shell sand, oil rigs nowhere seen. It’s Long Island, and the weather
is fine. What to disturb in the heart of a man?
A boy is not a body. A boy is a walk.
Shed the machine.
Must be entirely flesh to fight.
Must be strategy instead of filling.
What to disrobe, there, centrifugal logic, as in here is a slice of my
finger. Tell me the circumstance of your dick extension. When we
slip into imprecision, we lose control, windowless walls close in.
Awareness of being in a female body is a tinge of regret. “The human
frame to adapt itself to convention though she herself was a woman.”
To receive, to be entered, to fret around upon entry. It’s grand. I’m a
system. Plants tall as wheat to hide in.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
So, now I have confess’d that he is thine,
And I my self am mortgag’d to thy will,
Myself I’ll forfeit, so that other mine
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still:
But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,
For thou art covetous, and he is kind;
He learn’d but surety-like to write for me,
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou usurer, that putt’st forth all to use,
And sue a friend came debtor for my sake;
So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me:
He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
At the market today, I look for Piñata
apples, their soft-blush-yellow. My husband
brought them home last week, made me guess at
the name of this new strain, held one in his hand
like a gift and laughed as I tried all
the names I knew: Gala, Fuji, Honey
Crisp—watched his face for clues—what to call
something new? It's winter, only tawny
hues and frozen ground, but that apple bride
was sweet, and I want to bring it back to him,
that new. When he cut it, the star inside
held seeds of other stars, the way within
a life are all the lives you might live,
each unnamed, until you name it.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
What length of verse can serve brave Mopsa’s good to show,
Whose virtues strange, and beauties such, as no man them may know?
Thus shrewdly burden, then, how can my Muse escape?
The gods must help, and precious things must serve to show her shape.
Like great god Saturn, fair, and like fair Venus, chaste;
As smooth as Pan, as Juno mild, like goddess Iris fast.
With Cupid she foresees, and goes god Vulcan’s pace;
And for a taste of all these gifts, she borrows Momus’ grace.
Her forehead jacinth-like, her cheeks of opal hue,
Her twinkling eyes bedecked with pearl, her lips of sapphire blue,
Her hair pure crapall stone, her mouth, O heavenly wide,
Her skin like burnished gold, her hands like silver ore untried.
As for those parts unknown, which hidden sure are best,
Happy be they which believe, and never seek the rest.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
(at St. Mary's)
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back     may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
dis suit of clothes jus as empty
as a sky wid no stars
two years a workin   savin money
den   john drop out my heart
i dont want ta see his wife
i knows dat she is me
i’se could go in   shootin de rifle
let my angry run free
bes not   just my temper risin
no use stoking dead fire
but ta see his face one mo time
now lord   jus you on high
if he make do widout me now
i can make do lord   i can make do


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Hard to picture, but these Goliath trees
are taller still than Robeson. Outside
vast plate windows in this lecture hall,
I imagine him running down autumn fields,
see his black thighs pumping that machinery
across chalk-painted lines.
He loved the woman
in the lab, Eslanda, who saw order
in swimming circles on inch-wide slides, who
made photographs. I picture her standing
in darkness, led by red light, bathing paper
in broth, extracting images. Did this woman smile
to watch white paper darken, to pull wet
from the chemicals Paul Robeson’s totem face?


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Emotion scoops the footpath’s velvet edges,
estate agents’ bluster calibrates the street’s
livability, treeless, ajar with fridges
bunked out. Investors wave sheets
of sums to air, a tiny computer chalked
on glass, loving the artist’s marble noose
in adjacent pop-up gallery they might’ve forked
out for, but didn’t. It was no use
crying now though her vale of tears candies
a conquest, with stuck name tag and good insurance
that barely cost a sou. A countdown into space
echoes, blue lorikeets flit the race
and pigeons chew the eaves for reassurance
over suckling locals and tourist dandies.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Having been tenant long to a rich lord,
Not thriving,
I resolvèd to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.
In heaven at his manor I him sought;
They told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought Long since on earth, to take possessiòn.
I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts;
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied,
Who straight,
Your suit is granted, said, and died.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date;
But when in thee time’s furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate.
For all that beauty that doth cover thee,
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me:
How can I then be elder than thou art?
O! therefore love, be of thyself so wary
As I, not for myself, but for thee will;
Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary
As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.
Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain,
Thou gav’st me thine not to give back again.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Demain! Not much of a glass.
So-called legerdemain padded by you know who
in the direction of Argentina: a #3 pencil implacable
as a first aid kit. War or pine trees.
Thus nothing is spotted with Futurism
and hillsides, the idiom we skulk in
in honor of which differential diagnoses
take a nap in November worrisomeness.
Reliquary dreams. Frangipani!
If you leave without controlled faddishness,
shoulder to shoulder like butter, the
truculence is on the stargazer side.
What godsend fiddles with sadness. Careful
about cheekbones, songs including the Atlantic.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Their singer suffered breakdowns. In their work
there was a sense of what it was to live there at that time.
One song described the dark around the military
vehicles between them and the cocaine waiting
in Gramercy. It was about the sepsis that followed love
or love repeated as farce, the neck neck neck
damaged by an anonymous hand unstringing guitars.
They got away with it and worked to abolish youth
by knitting and paying half-attention. I thought I was
in love because my sentiments were matched
by a generic, abiding sense of unfreedom. Nothing
survives lovers descrying the red flags of old flames.
Nothing is more relatable than an unreasonable person
operating subtractively, indulgently, out of exasperation.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
I am being paraded through the streets with my head shaved,
with no memory of what I have done to deserve this.
I run a gauntlet of women who call me slut and whore,
staggering under their fusillade of accusation:
What stories did I tell, what lies? What names did I reveal?
What men did I sleep with? What did I do? For what reward?
Or in a catacomb deep under Paris they press gloves
of barbed wire on to my bare hands, and when the wounds have healed
they point to the brambles left on my palms, saying, Surely
these lines of head and heart and mind are those of a traitor.
When you wake I hold you tight, saying, It’s only a dream,
the language of dream has nothing to do with that of life.
And as eventually you sink back into the deep well
of sleep, I wonder if by my words I have betrayed you.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Now the god of rainy August hangs his mask
among the city’s spires and balustrades
and stone clocktowers half-effaced in clouds.
On Park the first reflecting pool dims
with a thousand smelted-silver circle-rims,
while west on Fifth a modiste scatters leaves
in fall vitrines, and felt-browed mannequins
resign the world with gestures of disdain.
Now in the Cloister’s high parterres the rain
floods copper gutterings, boxwood, terraced urns
and mottoes. “The weather turns.” Clamped to their pier,
the smiling Gaul, the murderer Clotaire,
and Isaiah, green-throned, water-cowled, exchange
their fine-lit ironies for rotes of pain.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
It was like soul-kissing, the way the words
filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk.
All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15,
but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne
by a breeze off Mount Parnassus. She must have seen
the darkest eyes in the room brim: The next day
she gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me
to read to the all except for me white class.
She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder,
said oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder
until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo playing
darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished
my classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent
to the buses, awed by the power of words.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
My true-love hath my heart and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given:
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss;
There never was a bargain better driven.
His heart in me keeps me and him in one;
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:
He loves my heart, for once it was his own;
I cherish his because in me it bides.
His heart his wound received from my sight;
My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;
For as from me on him his hurt did light,
So still, methought, in me his hurt did smart:
Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,
My true love hath my heart and I have his.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
For shame! deny that thou bear’st love to any,
Who for thyself art so unprovident.
Grant, if thou wilt, thou art belov’d of many,
But that thou none lov’st is most evident:
For thou art so possess’d with murderous hate,
That ’gainst thyself thou stick’st not to conspire,
Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate
Which to repair should be thy chief desire.
O! change thy thought, that I may change my mind:
Shall hate be fairer lodg’d than gentle love?
Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove:
Make thee another self for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Within this black hive to-night
There swarm a million bees;
Bees passing in and out the moon,
Bees escaping out the moon,
Bees returning through the moon,
Silver bees intently buzzing,
Silver honey dripping from the swarm of bees
Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb,
And I, a drone,
Lying on my back,
Lipping honey,
Getting drunk with that silver honey,
Wish that I might fly out past the moon
And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Immortal Love, author of this great frame,
Sprung from that beauty which can never fade,
How hath man parcel'd out Thy glorious name,
And thrown it on that dust which Thou hast made,
While mortal love doth all the title gain!
Which siding with Invention, they together
Bear all the sway, possessing heart and brain,
(Thy workmanship) and give Thee share in neither.
Wit fancies beauty, beauty raiseth wit;
The world is theirs, they two play out the game,
Thou standing by: and though Thy glorious name
Wrought our deliverance from th' infernal pit,
Who sings Thy praise? Only a scarf or glove
Doth warm our hands, and make them write of love.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I would I might forget that I am I,
And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,
Whose links about myself my deeds have cast.
What in the body’s tomb doth buried lie
Is boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky,
Lord of the future, guardian of the past,
And soon must forth, to know his own at last.
In his large life to live, I fain would die.
Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food,
But calling not his suffering his own;
Blessèd the angel, gazing on all good,
But knowing not he sits upon a throne;
Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood,
And doomed to know his aching heart alone.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy ‘Will,’
And ‘Will’ to boot, and ‘Will’ in over-plus;
More than enough am I that vex’d thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in ‘Will,’ add to thy ‘Will’
One will of mine, to make thy large will more.
Let no unkind ‘No’ fair beseechers kill;
Think all but one, and me in that one ‘Will.’


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung
And cut a flower beside a ground bird's nest
Before it stained a single human breast.
The stricken flower bent double and so hung.
And still the bird revisited her young.
A butterfly its fall had dispossessed
A moment sought in air his flower of rest,
Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.
On the bare upland pasture there had spread
O'ernight 'twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread
And straining cables wet with silver dew.
A sudden passing bullet shook it dry.
The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,
But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
We have almost nothing left,
no ground in common.
At best, a brand
or maybe a miniseries.
No campfire to gather around.
The big stories—peckish news
gets told in tweets,
gets old so quickly.
In place of one place
a billion tiny customized versions
appear targeted specifically
to your tastes.
You see only what you want to see.
Maybe you always did.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Half asleep in prayer I said the right thing
And felt a sudden pleasure come into
The room or my own body. In the dark,
Charged with a change of atmosphere, at first
I couldn’t tell my body from the room.
And I was wide awake, full of this feeling,
Alert as though I’d heard a doorknob twist,
A drawer pulled, and instead of terror knew
The intrusion of an overwhelming joy.
I had said thanks and this was the response.
But how I said it or what I said it for
I still cannot recall and I have tried
All sorts of ways all hours of the night.
Once was enough to be dissatisfied.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Summer’s sweet theatrum! The boy lunges through
The kitchen without comment, slams the door. An
Elaborate evening drama. I lug his forlorn weight
From floor to bed. Beatific lips and gap-
Toothed. Who stayed late to mope and swim, then
Breach chimneys of lake like a hooked gar
Pressing his wet totality against me. Iridescent
Laughter and depraved. Chromatic his constant state. At
Ten, childhood took off like a scorched dog. Turned
His head to see my hand wave from a window, and I too saw
The hand untouching, distant from. What fathering-
Fear slaked the impulse to embrace him? Duration!
An indefinite continuation of life. I whirled out wings. Going
Toward. And Lord Child claimed now, climbing loose.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Cyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench
Of British Themis, with no mean applause,
Pronounced, and in his volumes taught, our laws,
Which others at their bar so often wrench,
Today deep thoughts resolve with me to drench
In mirth that after no repenting draws;
Let Euclid rest, and Archimedes pause,
And what the Swede intend, and what the French.
To measure life learn thou betimes, and know
Toward solid good what leads the nearest way;
For other things mild Heaven a time ordains,
And disapproves that care, though wise in show,
That with superfluous burden loads the day,
And, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
In the dining room there is a brown fish
hanging on the wall who swims along
in his frame while we are eating dinner.
He swims in candlelight for all to see,
as if he has been swimming forever, even
in the darkness of the ink before someone thought
to draw him and the thin reeds waving in his stream
and the clear pebbles strewn upon the sand.
No wonder he continues his swimming
deep into the night, long after we have
blown out the candles and gone upstairs to bed.
No wonder I find him in the pale morning
light, still swimming, still looking out at me
with his one, small, spellbound eye.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
mary is an old woman without shoes.
she doesn’t believe it.
not when her belly starts to bubble
and leave the print of a finger where
no man touches.
not when the snow in her hair melts away.
not when the stranger she used to wait for
appears dressed in lights at her
kitchen table.
she is an old woman and
doesn’t believe it.
when Something drops onto her toes one night
she calls it a fox
but she feeds it.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
The moon shears up on Tahoe now:
A panther leaps to a tamarack bough.
She crouches, hugging the crooked limb:
She hears the nearing steps of him
Who sent the little puff of smoke
That stretched her mate beneath the oak.
Her eyes burn beryl, two yellow balls,
As Fate counts out his last footfalls.
A sudden spring, a demon cry,
Carnivorous laughter to the sky.
Her teeth are fastened in his throat
(The moon rides in her silver boat.)
And now one scream of long delight
Across the caverns of the night!


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil,
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn’d fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell:
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ’tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who, in despite of view, is pleased to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted;
Nor tender feeling, to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone:
But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,
Who leaves unsway’d the likeness of a man,
Thy proud heart’s slave and vassal wretch to be:
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Alone it stands in Poesy’s fair land,
A temple by the muses set apart;
A perfect structure of consummate art,
By artists builded and by genius planned.
Beyond the reach of the apprentice hand,
Beyond the ken of the unturtored heart,
Like a fine carving in a common mart,
Only the favored few will understand.
A chef-d’oeuvre toiled over with great care,
Yet which the unseeing careless crowd goes by,
A plainly set, but well-cut solitaire,
An ancient bit of pottery, too rare
To please or hold aught save the special eye,
These only with the sonnet can compare.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
But wherefore do not you a mightier way
Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time?
And fortify yourself in your decay
With means more blessed than my barren rhyme?
Now stand you on the top of happy hours,
And many maiden gardens, yet unset,
With virtuous wish would bear you living flowers,
Much liker than your painted counterfeit:
So should the lines of life that life repair,
Which this, Time’s pencil, or my pupil pen,
Neither in inward worth nor outward fair,
Can make you live yourself in eyes of men.
To give away yourself, keeps yourself still,
And you must live, drawn by your own sweet skill.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
That it was shy when alive goes without saying.
We know it vanished at the sound of voices
Or footsteps. It took wing at the slightest noises,
Though it could be approached by someone praying.
We have no recordings of it, though of course
In the basement of the Museum, we have some stuffed
Moth-eaten specimens—the Lesser Ruffed
And Yellow Spotted—filed in narrow drawers.
But its song is lost. If it was related to
A species of Quiet, or of another feather,
No researcher can know. Not even whether
A breeding pair still nests deep in the bayou,
Where legend has it some once common bird
Decades ago was first not seen, not heard.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
O what a strange parcel of creatures are we,
Scarce ever to quarrel, or even agree;
We all are alone, though at home altogether,
Except to the fire constrained by the weather;
Then one says, ‘’Tis cold’, which we all of us know,
And with unanimity answer, ‘’Tis so’:
With shrugs and with shivers all look at the fire,
And shuffle ourselves and our chairs a bit nigher;
Then quickly, preceded by silence profound,
A yawn epidemical catches around:
Like social companions we never fall out,
Nor ever care what one another’s about;
To comfort each other is never our plan,
For to please ourselves, truly, is more than we can.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
I sit with my thermos of coffee on the mall:
a mile-long promenade, arcades of elms
flanking a generous aliquot of benches.
But at this early hour it starts to dawn:
I am the only one without a dog.
So, a witness to an ancient symbiosis,
as it's evolved within a modern city:
The dogs, I note, are smaller, the owners
less ferocious. The former sniff then poop,
the latter, like potty-training parents, pat their heads,
gather it in plastic doggy-bags.
It's no longer for the hunt or for protection;
both species have adapted to survive
hard loneliness inside a small apartment.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Late in November, on a single night
Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand along the walk drop all their leaves
In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as though to time alone: the golden and green
Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.
What signal from the stars? What senses took it in?
What in those wooden motives so decided
To strike their leaves, to down their leaves,
Rebellion or surrender? and if this
Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt?
What use to learn the lessons taught by time.
If a star at any time may tell us: Now.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom of the well where the moon lives,
can you pull me
into December? a lowland
of space, perception of space
towering of shadows of clouds blown upon
clouds over
new ground, new made
under heavy December footsteps? the only
way to live?


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
It was so simple: you came back to me
And I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter
But that. That you had gone away from me
And lived for days with him—it didn’t matter.
That I had been left to care for our old dog
And house alone—couldn’t have mattered less!
On all this, you and I and our happy dog
Agreed. We slept. The world was worriless.
I woke in the morning, brimming with old joys
Till the fact-checker showed up, late, for work
And started in: Item: it’s years, not days.
Item: you had no dog. Item: she isn’t back,
In fact, she just remarried. And oh yes, item: you
Left her, remember?


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Owl small be enough
The child for all his feathers was a cold.
Oh wow the owl.
The poem the vowels
The owl, look its vowels
That branch for you
Owl, are you an armature vector
And a large step for mankind?
Owl astronaut burgeoning owl is a gift
You give to me give to you
Terrible other things happen.
We stay on our branch.
A hundred eyes
Two will do


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
She recognizes its crest in the way he looks at her.
The wave is as vast as the roiling mass in the Japanese
Print they had paused in front of at the museum,
Capped with ringlets of foam, all surging sinew.
That little village along the shore would be
Totally lost. There is no escaping this.
The wave is flooding his heart,
And he is sending the flood
Her way. It rushes
Over her.
Can you look at one face
For the whole of a life?
Does the moon peer down
At the tides and hunger for home?


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
When you, that at this moment are to me
Dearer than words on paper, shall depart,
And be no more the warder of my heart,
Whereof again myself shall hold the key;
And be no more—what now you seem to be—
The sun, from which all excellences start
In a round nimbus, nor a broken dart
Of moonlight, even, splintered on the sea;
I shall remember only of this hour—
And weep somewhat, as now you see me weep—
The pathos of your love, that, like a flower,
Fearful of death yet amorous of sleep,
Droops for a moment and beholds, dismayed,
The wind whereon its petals shall be laid.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Then I was sealed, and like the wintering tree
I stood me locked upon a summer core;
Living, had died a death, and asked no more.
And I lived then, but as enduringly,
And my heart beat, but only as to be.
Ill weathers well, hail, gust and cold I bore,
I held my life as hid, at root, in store:
Thus I lived then, till this air breathed on me.
Till this kind air breathed kindness everywhere,
There where my times had left me I would stay.
Then I was staunch, I knew nor yes nor no;
But now the wishful leaves have thronged the air.
My every leaf leans forth upon the day;
Alas, kind element! which comes to go.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait. Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
W a i t.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
NOW.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,
We sailed for the Hesperides,
The land where golden apples grow;
But that, ah! that was long ago.
How far, since then, the ocean streams Have swept us from that land of dreams,
That land of fiction and of truth,
The lost Atlantis of our youth!
Whither, ah, whither?
Are not these The tempest-haunted Orcades,
Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,
And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?
Ultima Thule!
Utmost Isle!
Here in thy harbors for a while We lower our sails; a while we rest From the unending, endless quest.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Watch thou and fear; to-morrow thou shalt die.
Or art thou sure thou shalt have time for death?
Is not the day which God's word promiseth
To come man knows not when? In yonder sky,
Now while we speak, the sun speeds forth: can I
Or thou assure him of his goal? God's breath
Even at this moment haply quickeneth
The air to a flame; till spirits, always nigh
Though screen'd and hid, shall walk the daylight here.
And dost thou prate of all that man shall do?
Canst thou, who hast but plagues, presume to be
Glad in his gladness that comes after thee?
Will his strength slay thy worm in Hell? Go to:
Cover thy countenance, and watch, and fear.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Suddenly, I stopped thinking about Love,
after so many years of only that,
after thinking that nothing else mattered.
And what was I thinking of when I stopped
thinking about Love? Death, of course—what else
could take Love’s place? What else could hold such force?
I thought about how far away Death once
had seemed, how unexpected that it could
happen to someone I knew quite well,
how impossible that this should be the
normal thing, as natural as frost and
winter. I thought about the way we’d aged,
how skin fell into wrinkles, how eyes grew
dim; then (of course) my love, I thought of you.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face — the face of one long dead —
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Men call you fair, and you do credit it,
For that your self ye daily such do see:
But the true fair, that is the gentle wit,
And vertuous mind, is much more prais'd of me.
For all the rest, how ever fair it be,
Shall turn to naught and lose that glorious hue:
But only that is permanent and free
From frail corruption, that doth flesh ensue.
That is true beauty: that doth argue you
To be divine, and born of heavenly seed:
Deriv'd from that fair Spirit, from whom all true
And perfect beauty did at first proceed.
He only fair, and what he fair hath made,
All other fair, like flowers untimely fade.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
Before these bastard signs of fair were born,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head;
Ere beauty’s dead fleece made another gay:
In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself and true,
Making no summer of another’s green,
Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;
And him as for a map doth Nature store,
To show false Art what beauty was of yore.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
The wooden horses
are tired of their courses
and plead from head to hoof
to be fed to a stove—
In leaping lunging flames
they’d rise again, flared manes
snapping like chains behind them.
The smoke would not blind them
as do these children’s hands:
beyond our cruel commands
the fire will free them then
as once the artisan when
out of the tree they
were nagged to this neigh.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
The other two, slight air, and purging fire
Are both with thee, wherever I abide;
The first my thought, the other my desire,
These present-absent with swift motion slide.
For when these quicker elements are gone
In tender embassy of love to thee,
My life, being made of four, with two alone
Sinks down to death, oppress’d with melancholy;
Until life’s composition be recur’d
By those swift messengers return’d from thee,
Who even but now come back again, assur’d,
Of thy fair health, recounting it to me:
This told, I joy; but then no longer glad,
I send them back again, and straight grow sad.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I steal your mailbox, leave
gum on your sidewalk. I
seduce your sister, ignore your wife.
I tear one page from each of your books.
I convince you that I am your friend.
*
When people ask about you,
I shake my head. When they
tell about you, I nod.
*
Today, I hang myself
from a greased flagpole
outside your picture window.
Yesterday, I stole your curtains.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars
Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most.
Great princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread
But as the marigold at the sun’s eye,
And in themselves their pride lies buried,
For at a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foil’d,
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toil’d:
Then happy I, that love and am belov’d,
Where I may not remove nor be remov’d.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only.  Do not say
“I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day”—
For these things in themselves, Belovëd, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so.  Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Sorrento, at night the long fingers of your orange lights
Prick me in the sizzling streets, where the pinnacles
Of other people ring tinny and papier-mâché. Is this the way
Up to the murderous cliff? It’s most important that I get there
And leave no witness. Ah, is this the majolica medallion
Which marks the grave of girl abducted by a stallion
Whom she gave a lump of maple sugar?
For that was in an autumn,
The time of year when young girls get hopeless and feel like
Giving it all away, the way a matronly merchant
Might brush off her lap, at the iron end of the market day:
It’s over, it’s worthless, without deserving and without
Purpose have I nourished this hope in my small patch of earth,
A sickly weed whose nodding sun’s gone nova.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:
Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,
Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: ‘Thou single wilt prove none.’


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
“and then looks at
the stars” from the
bed in the ambulance
looks up at boughs of
trees shifting quickly
lit in blackness
blackening soft, deep
siren’s song—she died
several times that night
and only in the weeks
to come started and
started to come back
then forward which is
real life


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,
Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,
And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,
Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,
Failed in its function as the autumn rake;
Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take
All water from the streams; dead birds were found
In wells a hundred feet below the ground—
Such was the season when the flower bloomed.
Old folks were startled, and it soon assumed
Significance. Superstition saw
Something it had never seen before:
Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,
Beauty so sudden for that time of year.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
The Visconti put you on their flag: a snake
devouring a child, or are you throwing up a man
feet first? Some snakes hunt frogs, some freedom of will.
There’s good in you: a man can count years on your skin.
Generously, you mother and father a stolen boy,
to the chosen you offer your cake of figs.
A goiter on my neck, you lick my ear with lies,
yet I must listen, smile and kiss your cheek
or you may swallow the child completely. In Milan
there is a triptych, the throned Virgin in glory,
placed on the marble below, a dead naked man
and a giant dead frog of human scale on its back.
There’s hope! My eyes look into the top of my head
at the wreath of snakes that sometimes crowns me.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
My love is as a fever longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now Reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly express’d;
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Puerto Rico was created when the pumpkin on top of
The turtle burst and its teeming waters poured out
With all mankind and beastkind riding on the waves
Until the water drained leaving a tropical paradise.
Puerto Rico was stumbled on by lost vampires bearing
Crucifix in one hand, arquebus in the other, sucking
The veins of land and men, tossing the pulp into the
Compost heap which they used as the foundation for
Their fortifications and other vainglorious temples.
Puerto Rico was arrested just as it broke out of the
Spanish jail and, renamed a trusty, it was put in an
American cell. When the prisoner hollered, "Yankee, Go
Home," Puerto Rico was referred to the United Nations.
Puerto Rico, to get to paradise now, you have to ride blood.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?— See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
“Is there no balm in Gilead?” So cries
dour Jeremiah in granite tones.
“There is a balm in Gilead,” replies
a Negro spiritual. The baritone
who chants it, leaning forward on the platform,
looks up, not knowing his voice is a rainstorm
that rinses air to reveal earth’s surprises.
Today, the summer gone, four monarch butterflies,
their breed’s survivors, sucked a flower’s last blooms,
opened their wings, orange-and-black stained glass,
and printed on the sky in zigzag lines,
watch bright things rise: winter moons, the white undersides
of a California condor, once thought doomed,
now flapping wide like the first bird from ashes.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,
Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,
And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought
Eternal beauty from the sculptured stone,—
A higher charm than modern culture won
With all the wealth of metaphysic lore,
Gifted to analyze, dissect, explore.
A many-colored light flows from one sun;
Art, ’neath its beams, a motley thread has spun;
The prism modifies the perfect day;
But thou hast known such mediums to shun,
And cast once more on life a pure, white ray.
Absorbed in the creations of thy mind,
Forgetting daily self, my truest self I find.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
My body is opaque to the soul.
Driven of the spirit, long have I sought to temper it unto the spirit’s
longing,
But my mind, too, is opaque to the soul.
O Spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger,
Direct it to the lid of its flesh-eye.
I am weak with much giving.
I am weak the desire to give more.
(How strong a thing is the little finger!)
So weak that I have confused the body with the soul,
And the body with its little finger.
(How frail is the little finger.)
My voice could not carry to you did you dwell in stars,
O spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger . .


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Something almost Flemish about that water,
a golden brown but clear into its depths,
the plank-ends of the dock a fading gray
beside it, and a boat moored at the end;
something, it seems to me in looking back,
about a murky bullhead on a stringer,
one of those rope ones you can hardly see,
so that the fish appeared to scull in place;
something (the details start to widen now)
about white wooden clapboards on the side
of that inn or tavern where my dad had stopped,
a neon beer sign staring out through glass—
late in the afternoon, I drinking deep
of everything I saw, now mine to keep.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
It is their way to find the surface
when they die.
Fish feed on fish
and drop those beautiful bones
to swim.
I see them stretch the water to their need
as I domesticate the separate air to be my
breath.
These fish die easily.
I find my surface in the way they feed.
Their gathering hunger is a flash like death.
No agony
as if
my mind had eaten death.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
In loving thee thou know’st I am forsworn,
But thou art twice forsworn, to me love swearing;
In act thy bed-vow broke, and new faith torn,
In vowing new hate after new love bearing:
But why of two oaths’ breach do I accuse thee,
When I break twenty? I am perjur’d most;
For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee,
And all my honest faith in thee is lost:
For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,
Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy;
And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,
Or made them swear against the thing they see;
For I have sworn thee fair; more perjured I,
but I my mistress so foul a lie.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
So now I have confessed that he is thine,
And I my self am mortgaged to thy will,
Myself I’ll forfeit, so that other mine
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still:
But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,
For thou art covetous, and he is kind;
He learned but surety-like to write for me,
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou usurer, that put’st forth all to use,
And sue a friend came debtor for my sake;
So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me:
He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid,
My verse alone had all thy gentle grace;
But now my gracious numbers are decay’d,
And my sick Muse doth give an other place.
I grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument
Deserves the travail of a worthier pen;
Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent
He robs thee of, and pays it thee again.
He lends thee virtue, and he stole that word
From thy behaviour; beauty doth he give,
And found it in thy cheek: he can afford
No praise to thee, but what in thee doth live.
Then thank him not for that which he doth say,
Since what he owes thee, thou thyself dost pay.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I should be happy with my lot:
A wife and mother – is it not Enough for me to be content?
What other blessing could be sent?
A quiet house, and homely ways,
That make each day like other days;
I only see Time’s shadow now Darken the hair on baby’s brow!
No world’s work ever comes to me,
No beggar brings his misery;
I have no power, no healing art With bruised soul or broken heart.
I read the poets of the age, ’Tis lotus-eating in a cage;
I study Art, but Art is dead To one who clamors to be fed With milk from Nature’s rugged breast,
Who longs for Labor’s lusty rest.
O foolish wish!
I still should pine If any other lot were mine.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Not in thy body is thy life at all
But in this lady's lips and hands and eyes;
Through these she yields thee life that vivifies
What else were sorrow's servant and death's thrall.
Look on thyself without her, and recall
The waste remembrance and forlorn surmise
That liv'd but in a dead-drawn breath of sighs
O'er vanish'd hours and hours eventual.
Even so much life hath the poor tress of hair
Which, stor'd apart, is all love hath to show
For heart-beats and for fire-heats long ago;
Even so much life endures unknown, even where,
'Mid change the changeless night environeth,
Lies all that golden hair undimm'd in death.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Looking into my daughter’s eyes I read
Beneath the innocence of morning flesh
Concealed, hintings of death she does not heed.
Coldest of winds have blown this hair, and mesh
Of seaweed snarled these miniatures of hands;
The night’s slow poison, tolerant and bland,
Has moved her blood. Parched years that I have seen
That may be hers appear: foul, lingering
Death in certain war, the slim legs green.
Or, fed on hate, she relishes the sting
Of others’ agony; perhaps the cruel
Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.
These speculations sour in the sun.
I have no daughter. I desire none.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Christ bore what suffering he could and died
a young man, but you waited years to learn
how to heal. Only when you could did you
touch the man whose body blistered for yours.
You posted him no news for sixteen terms,
then just a signed graduation notice.
The letter he wrote that week asked only,
Now that your books are closed, can boys come in?
At your wedding, you buried the woman
you thought you knew inside a stranger’s name.
This is how you found yourself: thirty-three,
nursing a son. Soon there was another.
Your mind had already begun to walk.
But you were a mother. Those cribs held you.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.
Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust,
Their usage, pride, admitted within doors;
At home, under caved chantries, set in trust,
With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs
They lie; they lie; secure in the decay
Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted,
Before the scouring fires of trial-day
Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head,
Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea
Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Under a heavy wire milk case,
A piece of concrete foundation
On top, in summer, in her backyard,
Mrs. Russo keeps the cat Nikita safe
From birds, from dogs, from eating
Johnson grass, which he throws up.
Nikita waits for ants to wander in
And for the sun to leave.
Instead, she comes to keep him
Company, saying You look fat
And that her son died,
Remember I told you?
Walking thin in his uniform
On a road.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Cupid laid by his brand and fell asleep:
A maid of Dian’s this advantage found,
And his love-kindling fire did quickly steep
In a cold valley-fountain of that ground;
Which borrow’d from this holy fire of Love,
A dateless lively heat, still to endure,
And grew a seething bath, which yet men prove
Against strange maladies a sovereign cure.
But at my mistress’ eye Love’s brand new-fired,
The boy for trial needs would touch my breast;
I, sick withal, the help of bath desired,
And thither hied, a sad distemper’d guest,
But found no cure, the bath for my help lies
Where Cupid got new fire; my mistress’ eyes.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
My love looks like a girl to-night,
But she is old.
The plaits that lie along her pillow
Are not gold,
But threaded with filigree silver,
And uncanny cold.
She looks like a young maiden, since her brow
Is smooth and fair,
Her cheeks are very smooth, her eyes are closed.
She sleeps a rare Still winsome sleep, so still, and so composed.
Nay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her dreams
Of perfect things.
She lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream,
And her dead mouth sings By its shape, like the thrushes in clear evenings.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
The train moved me, clothes kept me seated.
I watched the tunnel walls blur and my face appear, nicer on black plexiglass.
The people carried off like I almost was
in the old childhood dream, my mother’s hand, the tornado in the parking lot.
Flooring soda and rain, a humble poser, a composed consumer.
Come back to me, I whispered to the purifying wind in a country I’d visited years earlier.
Come get me, I said to imaginary John Lennon in the passenger seat of my 1984 Volvo.
Nothing grows anywhere, I noted in the slick urine grime connecting two underground stations.
As for my wallet, it was light in my hand, fictitious, I didn’t deserve it —
I held it up in the crowded terminal like a magician’s pigeon.
Or I hid it between my knees on the jerking seat.
Nobody wanted to touch me, or
nobody who wanted to could reach me here,
shaken like a screaming child under wet stairs.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
O! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour, which doth in it live.
The canker blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses.
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths, are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall vade, by verse distills your truth.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
From low to high doth dissolution climb,
And sink from high to low, along a scale
Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail;
A musical but melancholy chime,
Which they can hear who meddle not with crime,
Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care.
Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain
And is no more; drop like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear
His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;
Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,
And do not drop in for an after-loss:
Ah! do not, when my heart hath ’scap’d this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquer’d woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
To linger out a purpos’d overthrow.
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite,
But in the onset come: so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune’s might;
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compar’d with loss of thee, will not seem so.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer’s time;
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of orphans, and unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
there’s nothing in my face.
There is nothing in yours.
What we have are called heads.
They are nothing unless we kiss.
Lips are wonderful.
They are full of mechanoreceptors.
In the Old World we all used to kiss and kiss.
It was then that we did have faces.
We had noses and cheeks and foreheads and soft, downy hair.
In the New World we stopped kissing.
Those who were already here stopped.
Those who came stopped.
Now there are only four people who have heads that are also faces.
They are an artist and three children for whom I have a face other than my hands.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Who cares about the redbud tree, its flowers
half-black, half-pink, from winter’s April freeze;
who cares who lives halfway or dies too soon,
the blue jay’s baby squirming on bare ground,
the agonies of blood, the frigid breeze
shaking the fragile sense of April showers;
who cares who craves the heated pools of June,
the lake of boaters buzzing by or drowned.
Two vultures meet me at my open door,
scanning for carrion, the stink of spasms,
the sky-gods pecking rotting flesh for food;
who cares if this strange order ends in good,
or if the chickadee lands in the chasms
of endless carelessness forevermore.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
When I was a child I knew red miners
dressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps.
I saw them come down red hills to their camps
dyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines.
Night after night I met them on the roads,
or on the streets in town I caught their glance;
the swing of dinner buckets in their hands,
and grumbling undermining all their words.
I also lived in low cotton country
where moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks,
or stumps of trees, and croppers’ rotting shacks
with famine, terror, flood, and plague near by;
where sentiment and hatred still held sway
and only bitter land was washed away.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day
Afford thy drowzy patience leave to stay
One hower longer: so that we might either
Sate up, or gone to bedd together?
But since thy finisht labor hath possest
Thy weary limbs with early rest,
Enjoy it sweetly: and thy widdowe bride
Shall soone repose her by thy slumbring side.
Whose business, now, is only to prepare
My nightly dress, and call to prayre:
Mine eyes wax heavy and ye day growes old.
The dew falls thick, my beloved growes cold.
Draw, draw ye closed curtaynes: and make room:
My dear, my dearest dust; I come, I come.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
My heart be brave, and do not falter so,
Nor utter more that deep, despairing wail.
Thy way is very dark and drear I know,
But do not let thy strength and courage fail;
For certain as the raven-winged night
Is followed by the bright and blushing morn,
Thy coming morrow will be clear and bright;
’Tis darkest when the night is furthest worn.
Look up, and out, beyond, surrounding clouds,
And do not in thine own gross darkness grope,
Rise up, and casting off thy hind’ring shrouds,
Cling thou to this, and ever inspiring hope:
Tho’ thick the battle and tho’ fierce the fight,
There is a power making for the right.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Who is it that says most, which can say more,
Than this rich praise: that you alone are you,
In whose confine immured is the store
Which should example where your equal grew.
Lean penury within that pen doth dwell
That to his subject lends not some small glory;
But he that writes of you, if he can tell
That you are you, so dignifies his story,
Let him but copy what in you is writ,
Not making worse what nature made so clear,
And such a counterpart shall fame his wit,
Making his style admired every where.
You to your beauteous blessings add a curse,
Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold, and see not what they see?
They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
Yet what the best is take the worst to be.
If eyes, corrupt by over-partial looks,
Be anchor’d in the bay where all men ride,
Why of eyes’ falsehood hast thou forged hooks,
Whereto the judgement of my heart is tied?
Why should my heart think that a several plot,
Which my heart knows the wide world’s common place?
Or mine eyes, seeing this, say this is not,
To put fair truth upon so foul a face?
In things right true my heart and eyes have err’d,
And to this false plague are they now transferr’d.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Anything can be a bird if you’re not careful.
I should say something nice about the weather.
I should be in awe of the living, but the world dulls
when I step into it. The squirrels scatter, the branches
lift. Sure, I’ve hurt the ones I’ve loved
by not paying attention. Not alone — never alone
is a lesson I need to understand. It was you who said that.
It’s you still. You who says, Look! You who points
to the sky. You who tilts my chin toward the heron,
who cups the minnow in your hands,
who spots the deer miles ahead, who dulls
the world with your absence. You who says, Look!
& when I look, you are gone, replaced
by the whitetail’s hind legs, fading into the bush.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
There may be chaos still around the world,
This little world that in my thinking lies;
For mine own bosom is the paradise
Where all my life’s fair visions are unfurled.
Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled,
Unmindful of the changing outer skies,
Where now, perchance, some new-born Eros flies,
Or some old Cronos from his throne is hurled.
I heed them not; or if the subtle night
Haunt me with deities I never saw,
I soon mine eyelid’s drowsy curtain draw
To hide their myriad faces from my sight.
They threat in vain; the whirlwind cannot awe
A happy snow-flake dancing in the flaw.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
If my dear love were but the child of state,
It might for Fortune’s bastard be unfather’d,
As subject to Time’s love or to Time’s hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather’d.
No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled discontent,
Whereto th’ inviting time our fashion calls:
It fears not policy, that heretic,
Which works on leases of short-number’d hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic,
That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.
To this I witness call the fools of time,
Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Sweet poet of the woods, a long adieu!
Farewell soft mistrel of the early year!
Ah! ’twill be long ere thou shalt sing anew,
And pour thy music on the night’s dull ear.
Whether on spring thy wandering flights await,
Or whether silent in our groves you dwell,
The pensive muse shall own thee for her mate,
And still protect the song she loves so well.
With cautious step the love-lorn youth shall glide
Through the lone brake that shades thy mossy nest;
And shepherd girls from eyes profane shall hide
The gentle bird who sings of pity best:
For still thy voice shall soft affections move,
And still be dear to sorrow and to love!


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
My love is strengthen’d, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear;
That love is merchandiz’d, whose rich esteeming,
The owner’s tongue doth publish every where.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,
And stops her pipe in growth of riper days:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burthens every bough,
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
Therefore like her, I sometime hold my tongue:
Because I would not dull you with my song.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel;
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there;
Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness every where:
Then were not summer’s distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.
There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,
Like the memory of scales descending the white keys
Of a childhood piano—outside the window, palms!
And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,
Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.
Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,
Like the memory of a white dress cast down . . .
So much has fallen.
And I, who have listened for a step
All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,
Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending
On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers
abounding.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
The child I was came to me
once,
a strange face
He said nothing              We walked
each of us glancing at the other in silence, our steps
a strange river running in between
We were brought together by good manners
and these sheets now flying in the wind
then we split,
a forest written by earth
watered by the seasons’ change.
Child who once was, come forth—
What brings us together now,
and what do we have to say?


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Amazement fills my heart to-night,
Amaze and awful fears;
I am a ship that sees no light,
But blindly onward steers.
Flung toward heaven’s toppling rage,
Sunk between steep and steep,
A lost and wondrous fight I wage  With the embattled deep.
I neither know nor care at length  Where drives the storm about;
Only I summon all my strength  And swear to ride it out.
Yet give I thanks; despite these wars.
My ship—though blindly blown,
Long lost to sun or moon or stars—  Still stands up alone.
I need no trust in borrowed spars;
My strength is yet my own.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
As I come down the hill from Toro Poutini’s house
My feet are sore, being bare, on the sharp stones
And that is a suitable penance. The dust of the pa road
Is cool, though, and I can see
The axe of the moon shift down behind the trees
Very slowly. The red light from the windows
Of the church has a ghostly look, and in
This place ghosts are real. The bees are humming loudly
In moonlight in their old hive above the church door
Where I go in to kneel, and come out to make my way
Uphill past a startled horse who plunges in the paddock
Above the nunnery. Now there are one or two
Of the tribe back in the big house—What would you have me do,
King Jesus? Your games with me have turned me into a boulder.