Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
The great gold apples of night
Hang from the street's long bough
Dripping their light
On the faces that drift below,
On the faces that drift and blow
Down the night-time, out of sight
In the wind's sad sough.
The ripeness of these apples of night
Distilling over me
Makes sickening the white
Ghost-flux of faces that hie
Them endlessly, endlessly by
Without meaning or reason why
They ever should be.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
God washes clean the souls and hearts of you,
His favored ones, whose backs bend o’er the soil,
Which grudging gives to them requite for toil
In sober graces and in vision true.
God places in your hands the pow’r to do
A service sweet. Your gift supreme to foil
The bare-fanged wolves of hunger in the moil
Of Life’s activities. Yet all too few
Your glorious band, clean sprung from Nature’s heart;
The hope of hungry thousands, in whose breast
Dwells fear that you should fail. God placed no dart
Of war within your hands, but pow’r to start
Tears, praise, love, joy, enwoven in a crest
To crown you glorious, brave ones of the soil.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem’d it winter still, and you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Plum black & the blush white of an apple
shoulder, melon & cream, in tones to list
the flesh; in light, washed colors off at last
& textures sheer with damp I slowly pull
from you with your quick help. Weekend's ample
procrastinations to forget the least
of what we want to do. April, half a blast
of cold, half new light, green & simple.
Now dusk. Now fear. We pencil what we owe
on this short form, our numbers good enough.
The goose-neck glare undoes how we spent the day.
Each bite each bee-sting kiss each bitten O
all aftertaste. Later, at the drop-off,
postmark queue, we joke: "Now we can die!"


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Indeed this very love which is my boast,
And which, when rising up from breast to brow,
Doth crown me with a ruby large enow
To draw men’s eyes and prove the inner cost,—
This love even, all my worth, to the uttermost,
I should not love withal, unless that thou
Hadst set me an example, shown me how,
When first thine earnest eyes with mine were crossed,
And love called love.  And thus, I cannot speak
Of love even, as a good thing of my own:
Thy soul hath snatched up mine all faint and weak,
And placed it by thee on a golden throne,—
And that I love (O soul, we must be meek!)
Is by thee only, whom I love alone.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Terrace deep as the sky.
Stone bench where I sit and read,I wandered by myselfInto the heart of the mountains of Yoshino.
In one hand a book, in the other, a bag made of newsprint—
No weather-beaten bones here
Just lychees bought in the market,
Thirty rupees per kilogram.
Stalks mottled red tied up with string,
Flesh the color of pigeon wings—
Sweet simmering.
Sunlight bruises air
Pine trees blacken.
Where shall I go?
The Dhauladhar peaks
Are covered in snow.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone.
He has loved her voice and listens with attention
to every modulation of its tone. Knowing
it intimately. Not knowing what he wants
from the sound of it, from the tendered civility.
He studies, out the window, the seed shapes
of the broken pods of ornamental trees.
The kind that grow in everyone’s garden, that no one
but horticulturists can name. Four arched chambers
of pale green, tiny vegetal proscenium arches,
a pair of black tapering seeds bedded in each chamber.
A wish geometry, miniature, Indian or Persian,
lovers or gods in their apartments. Outside, white,
patient animals, and tangled vines, and rain.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
How solitary
and resolute you look in the morning.
A stoic in your cotton sleeve.
Do you dream of walking out
rain or shine
a truffle balanced on your sternum
and passing me on the sidewalk?
Or is that a smile
because you interpret nothing
and statelessness is where you live?
How calmly you indulge my moods.
See you tonight, by the sovereign chartreuse
ceramics at the Met.
Let's hear what you'd do differently.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
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 beloved
Where I may not remove nor be removed.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy,
And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy;
For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects’ faith doth ebb,
Which should not be if reason ruled or wisdom weaved the web.
But clouds of joys untried do cloak aspiring minds,
Which turn to rain of late repent by changed course of winds.
The top of hope supposed the root upreared shall be,
And fruitless all their grafted guile, as shortly ye shall see.
The dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds,
Shall be unsealed by worthy wights whose foresight falsehood finds.
The daughter of debate that discord aye doth sow Shall reap no gain where former rule still peace hath taught to know.
No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port;
Our realm brooks not seditious sects, let them elsewhere resort.
My rusty sword through rest shall first his edge employ To poll their tops that seek such change or gape for future joy.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
I flew into Denver April.
Rock salt and sand peppered the asphalt
reflecting myself on a downtown street
where I’d paused on my route to smell lilacs.
The wanton winds chortled wickedly
over remnant snows in gray clumps of doom
and my heart soared gladly at winter’s death
but an hour later I had whiskey breath
at a dead end bar full of Indians.
A Winnebago woman waltzed with me
and told me how handsome I truly was
so I bought her drinks and felt her hips
and somewhere between the grinds
and dips she lifted my wallet and split.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Three dark buds for the Trinity
On one twig I found in the lining of my coat
Forgotten since I broke them from the tree
That grows opposite the RSA building
At the top of Vulcan Lane — there I would lay down my parka
On the grass and meditate, cross-legged; there was a girl
Who sat beside me there;
She would hold a blue flower at the centre of the bullring
While the twigs on the tree became black
And then slowly green again — she was young — if I had said,
‘Have my coat; have my money’ —
She would have gone away; but because I gave her nothing
She came again and again to share that nothing
Like a bird that nest in the open hand.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
For ten years I would not say the name.
I said: episode. Said: setback, incident,
exacerbation—anything but be specific
in the way this is specific, not a theory
or description, but a diagnosis.
I said: muscle, weakness, numbness, fatigue.
I said vertigo, neuritis, lesion, spasm.
Remission. Progression. Recurrence. Deficit.
But the name, the ugly sound of it, I refused.
There are two words. The last one means: scarring.
It means what grows hard, and cannot be repaired.
The first one means: repeating, or myriad,
consisting of many parts, increasing in number,
happening over and over, without end.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Sometimes she is a child within mine arms,
Cowering beneath dark wings that love must chase,—
With still tears showering and averted face,
Inexplicably fill'd with faint alarms:
And oft from mine own spirit's hurtling harms
I crave the refuge of her deep embrace,—
Against all ills the fortified strong place
And sweet reserve of sovereign counter-charms.
And Love, our light at night and shade at noon,
Lulls us to rest with songs, and turns away
All shafts of shelterless tumultuous day.
Like the moon's growth, his face gleams through his tune;
And as soft waters warble to the moon,
Our answering spirits chime one roundelay.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
‘Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss:
The offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offence’s cross.
Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
White flabbiness goes brown and lean,
Dumpling arms are now brass bars,
They’ve learnt to suffer and live clean,
And to think below the stars.
They’ve steeled a tender, girlish heart,
Tempered it with a man’s pride,
Learning to play the butcher’s part
Though the woman screams inside—   Learning to leap the parapet,
Face the open rush, and then To stab with the stark bayonet,
Side by side with fighting men.
On Achi Baba’s rock their bones
Whiten, and on Flanders’ plain,
But of their travailings and groans
Poetry is born again.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate,
Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving:
O! but with mine compare thou thine own state,
And thou shalt find it merits not reproving;
Or, if it do, not from those lips of thine,
That have profan’d their scarlet ornaments
And seal’d false bonds of love as oft as mine,
Robb’d others’ beds’ revenues of their rents.
Be it lawful I love thee, as thou lov’st those
Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee:
Root pity in thy heart, that, when it grows,
Thy pity may deserve to pitied be.
If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide,
By self-example mayst thou be denied!


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind;
And that which governs me to go about
Doth part his function and is partly blind,
Seems seeing, but effectually is out;
For it no form delivers to the heart
Of bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch:
Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,
Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch;
For if it see the rud’st or gentlest sight,
The most sweet favour or deformed’st creature,
The mountain or the sea, the day or night:
The crow, or dove, it shapes them to your feature.
Incapable of more, replete with you,
My most true mind thus maketh mine untrue.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Not long ago, or maybe I dreamt it
Or made it up, or have suddenly lost
Track of its train in the hocus pocus
Of the dissolving days; no, if I bend
The turn around the corner, come at it
From all three sides at once, or bounce the ball
Against all manner of bleary-eyed fortune
Tellers—well, you can see for yourselves there’s
Nothing up my sleeves, or notice even
Rocks occasionally break if enough
Pressure is applied. As far as you go
In one direction, all the further you’ll
Have to go on before the way back has
Become totally indivisible.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
That scraping of iron on iron when the wind
rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t
quit with, but drags back and forth.
Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just
beyond the screened door, as if someone there
squats in the dark honing his wares against
my threshold. Half steel wire, half metal wing,
nothing and anything might make this noise
of saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning
of bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of rust,
or ore abraded. Tonight, something bows
that should not bend. Something stiffens that should
slide. Something, loose and not right,
rakes or forges itself all night.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
—at Apollo Hospital, Dhaka
Let me break
free of these lace-frail
lilac fingers disrobing
the black sky
from the windows of this
room, I sit helpless, waiting,
silent—sister,
because you drew from me
the coil of red twine: loneliness—
spooled inside—
once, I wanted to say one
true thing, as in, I want more
in this


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name;
But now is black beauty’s successive heir,
And beauty slander’d with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on Nature’s power,
Fairing the foul with Art’s false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profan’d, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland’ring creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
You are a seahorse unraveling.
You are the back of a landhorse looking backward.
Gotten away form have you thrown yourself racing.
Who took what was not out of thunderous shade
In an all-knowing sycamore's branches.
What who do you make of stone steps you stepped through.
You took the boat onto flattened waters.
White wall of blue morning fog to slip into.
You withstood what is was that was wailing you through.
There you were standing on nothing, looking down at two
Blackfeathered slashes your two hands held on to.
Off were you going aloft would birds such as these take
You.
Who leaned you and stood you and shook you and shook you.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
O! never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seem’d my flame to qualify,
As easy might I from my self depart
As from my soul which in thy breast doth lie:
That is my home of love: if I have rang’d,
Like him that travels, I return again;
Just to the time, not with the time exchang’d,
So that myself bring water for my stain.
Never believe though in my nature reign’d,
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That it could so preposterously be stain’d,
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good;
For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose, in it thou art my all.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Nude bodies like peeled logs
sometimes give off a sweetest
odor, man and woman
under the trees in full excess
matching the cushion of
aromatic pine-drift fallen
threaded with trailing woodbine
a sonnet might be made of it
Might be made of it! odor of excess
odor of pine needles, odor of
peeled logs, odor of no odor
other than trailing woodbine that
has no odor, odor of a nude woman
sometimes, odor of a man.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Content that now the bleeding bone be swept
Out of her reach, she lay upon her side.
In a blonde void sunk deep, she slept, she slept
Bland as a child, slept, breathing like a bride.
Color of noons that shimmer as they sing
Above the dunes, her sandy flanks heaved slow.
Between her paws curled inward, billowing
Waves of desert silence seemed to flow.
The crowd was gone, the bars were gone, the cage
Thinned into air, the sawdust and the fleas
Winnowed by sleep to nothing. After food,
Absence possessed her: bliss keener than rage,
If slumber’s prisoner at a bound could seize
This ghostly freedom, lapping it like blood.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
The subtlest strain a great musician weaves,
Cannot attain in rhythmic harmony
To music in his soul. May it not be
Celestial lyres send hints to him? He grieves
That half the sweetness of the song, he leaves
Unheard in the transition. Thus do we
Yearn to translate the wondrous majesty
Of some rare mood, when the rapt soul receives
A vision exquisite. Yet who can match
The sunset’s iridescent hues? Who sing
The skylark’s ecstasy so seraph-fine?
We struggle vainly, still we fain would catch
Such rifts amid life’s shadows, for they bring
Glimpses ineffable of things divine.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
[we] are watching a documentary about home
birth when [you] first feel [neni] kick // embryo
of hope // they say plastic is the perfect creation
because it never dies // litters the beaches
of o‘ahu, this “gathering place” // the doctor
recommends a c-section // in the sea, plastic multiplies
into smaller pieces, leaches estrogenic and toxic
chemicals // if [we] cut open the bellies of whales
and large fish, what fragments will [we] find, derived
from oil, absorbed into tissue // because plastic
never dissolves, every product ever made still exists,
somewhere, today // i wish my daughter was made
of plastic so that she will survive [our] wasteful
hands // so that she, too, will have a great future


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Stop playing. You do remember the card tables,
Slick stick figures like men with low-cut fades,
Short but standing straight
Because we bent them into weak display.
What didn’t we want? What wouldn’t we claim?
How perfectly each surface was made
For throwing or dropping or slamming a necessary
Portion of our pay.
And how could any of us get by
With one in the way?
Didn’t that bare square ask to be played
On, beaten in the head, then folded, then put away,
All so we could call ourselves safe
Now that there was more room, a little more space?


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
But only three in all God’s universe
Have heard this word thou hast said,—Himself, beside
Thee speaking, and me listening! and replied
One of us . . . that was God, . . . and laid the curse
So darkly on my eyelids, as to amerce
My sight from seeing thee,—that if I had died,
The death-weights, placed there, would have signified
Less absolute exclusion.  “Nay” is worse
From God than from all others, O my friend!
Men could not part us with their worldly jars,
Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend;
Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars:
And, heaven being rolled between us at the end,
We should but vow the faster for the stars.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead;
And there reigns Love, and all Love’s loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stol’n from mine eye,
As interest of the dead, which now appear
But things remov’d that hidden in thee lie!
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give,
That due of many now is thine alone:
Their images I lov’d, I view in thee,
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
what a saint you are, shining on everything,
drawn to the world like flames are to moths,
like honey to bees. So readily do you dole
yourself out, and in such abundance so that
we might operate our otherwise redundant eyes.
For they’d be useless even as shiny bibelots
that studded the otherwise dull surfaces of faces.
No, in your absence, in that total darkness
the eyes wouldn’t see or even be seen. And they
would soon shrivel up and desiccate, die out
from pointlessness like the little toe will
(unless we can find a way to reverse its long
decline). Hey, plump eyes! Isn’t it time you put
your tiny wet hands together for the light!


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Cyriack, this three years' day these eyes, though clear
To outward view of blemish or of spot,
Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot;
Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear Of sun or moon or star throughout the year,
Or man or woman.
Yet I argue not
Against Heav'n's hand or will, not bate a jot
Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer Right onward.
What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In liberty's defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask
Content, though blind, had I no better guide.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
The maggot dreams of the ear and
the wound, that welcome dark between
gauze and knee, cheek and skull, and
any open moment in the
body that will have it. The child-
fly wants a mouth to grow into,
a burn to salve, a heart to feed
on. It calls for sugar and Job
and marrow. The maggot loves St.
Lazarus, though he walked away,
loves the warm cutbanks of the chest.
When the maggot asks for wings, we
will answer with painted hands, eyes
beneath coins, a promise of graves.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
i must be careful about such things as these.
the thin-grained oak.    the quiet grizzlies scared
into the hills by the constant tracks squeezing
in behind them closer in the snow.    the snared
rigidity of the winter lake.    deer after deer
crossing on the spines of fish who look up and stare
with their eyes pressed to the ice.   in a sleep.  hearing
the thin taps leading away to collapse like the bear
in the high quiet.   i must be careful not to shake
anything in too wild an elation.    not to jar
the fragile mountains against the paper far-
ness.   nor avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air.
of the gentle wilderness i must set the precarious
words.   like rocks.   without one snowcapped mistake.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Our stone wall was built by slaves and my bones, my bones
are paid for. We have two
of everything, twice heavy
in our pockets, warming
our two big hands.
This is the story, as I know it. One morning:
the ships came, as foretold, and death
pearl-handled, almost
and completely.
How cheap a date I turned out to be.
Each finger weak with the memory:
lost teeth, regret. Our ghosts
walk the shoulders of the road at night.
I get the feeling you’ve been lying to me.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
In that proud port, which her so goodly graceth,
Whiles her faire face she reares up to the skie:
And to the ground her eie lids low embaseth
Most goodly temperature ye may descry,
Myld humblesse mixt with awfull majesty,
For looking on the earth whence she was borne:
Her minde remembreth her mortalitie,
What so is fayrest shall to earth returne.
But that same lofty countenance seemes to scorne
Base thing, and thinke how she to heaven may clime:
Treading downe earth as lothsome and forlorne,
That hinders heavenly thoughts with drossy slime.
Yet lowly still vouchsafe to looke on me,
Such lowlinesse shall make you lofty be.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
If Black History Month is not
viable then wind does not
carry the seeds and drop them
on fertile ground
rain does not
dampen the land
and encourage the seeds
to root
sun does not
warm the earth
and kiss the seedlings
and tell them plain:
You’re As Good As Anybody Else
You’ve Got A Place Here, Too


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,
Which hold my life in their dead doing might
Shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands,
Lyke captives trembling at the victors sight.
And happy lines, on which with starry light,
Those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look
And reade the sorrowes of my dying spright,
Written with teares in harts close bleeding book.
And happy rymes bath’d in the sacred brooke,
Of Helicon whence she derived is,
When ye behold that Angels blessed looke,
My soules long lacked foode, my heavens blis.
Leaves, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone,
Whom if ye please, I care for other none.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I live a small life, barely bigger than a speck,
barely more than a blip on the radar sweep
though it is not nothing, as the garter snake
climbs the rock rose shrub and the squirrel creeps
on bramble thorns. Not nothing to the crows
who heckle from the crowns of the last light’s trees
winterstripped of green, except for the boles
that ivy winds each hour round. See, the world is busy
and the world is quick, barely time for a spider
to suck the juice from a hawk moth’s head
so it can use the moth as a spindle that it wraps in fiber
while the moth constricts until it’s thin as a stick
you might think was nothing, a random bit
caught in a web coming loose from the window frame, in wind.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Hand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights
Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights.
Ah, the delirious weeks of honeymoon!
Soon they returned, and, after strange adventures,
Settled at Balham by the end of June.
Their money was in Can. Pacs. B. Debentures,
And in Antofagastas. Still he went
Cityward daily; still she did abide
At home. And both were really quite content
With work and social pleasures. Then they died.
They left three children (besides George, who drank):
The eldest Jane, who married Mr Bell,
William, the head-clerk in the County Bank,
And Henry, a stock-broker, doing well.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther;
As with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.
No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that’s come from birchen bowers.
Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter’s wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:
As white their bark, so white this lady’s hours.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.
Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh
joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then
I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?
Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you never can bring back,
or else you’re off in some fog concerning
—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:
to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,
my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,
a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,
entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Into this net of leaves, green as old glass
That the sun fondles, trembling like images
In water, this live net, swung overhead
From branch to branch, what swam? The spider’s thread
Is less passive, where it appears to float
Like a bright hair clinging to the wind’s coat.
Hot at work, history neither schemes nor grieves
Here where the soaking dead are last year’s leaves,
And over them slung, meshed with sun, a net
No creature wove, none frantically tried to fret.
The huge weight of time without its sting
Hangs in that greenly cradling woof. A wing
Has caught there, held. Held. But not to stay,
We know, who, how slowly, walk away.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
i be but i don’t is. i been & i
am one who be on my own biz. i love
not a b____. but see know i been loved. i’m
one who been that & then not deserved much
cuz i been on my own dirt. i don’t know
love. i been a lie but don’t be a lie
i be fly sometimes but don’t be a fly
sometimes i be addict-like but not high
like an addict’s like. just scratching low stones
like an addict might. stop? not an option.
i be getting mine. been getting over.
been over this but be caught in a cycle.
but you be what you be & it be good.
& i be moved & making new habits.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
The leaves had fallen in that sullen place,
but none around him knew just where they were.
The sky revealed no sun. A ragged blur
remained where each man's face had been a face.
Two angels soon crept forth with trays of bread,
circling among the lost like prison guards.
Love is not love, unless its will affords
forgiveness for the words that are not said.
Still he could not believe that this was Hell,
that others sent before him did not know;
yet, once his name and memory grew faint,
it was no worse, perhaps, than a cheap motel.
It is the love of failure makes a saint.
He stood up then, but did not try to go.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Let me confess that we two must be twain,
Although our undivided loves are one:
So shall those blots that do with me remain,
Without thy help, by me be borne alone.
In our two loves there is but one respect,
Though in our lives a separable spite,
Which though it alter not love’s sole effect,
Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love’s delight.
I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,
Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name:
But do not so, I love thee in such sort,
As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Those lips that Love’s own hand did make,
Breathed forth the sound that said ‘I hate’,
To me that languish’d for her sake:
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was us’d in giving gentle doom;
And taught it thus anew to greet;
‘I hate’ she alter’d with an end,
That followed it as gentle day,
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away.
‘I hate’, from hate away she threw,
And sav’d my life, saying ‘not you’.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Like the Idalian queen,
Her hair about her eyne,
With neck and breast’s ripe apples to be seen,
At first glance of the morn
In Cyprus’ gardens gathering those fair flowers
Which of her blood were born,
I saw, but fainting saw, my paramours.
The Graces naked danced about the place,
The winds and trees amazed
With silence on her gazed,
The flowers did smile, like those upon her face;
And as their aspen stalks those fingers band,
That she might read my case,
A hyacinth I wished me in her hand.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
All you violated ones with gentle hearts;
You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;
Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,
And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.
All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums
Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,
Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,
Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.
Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!
Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!
Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.
You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brains.
When and Where will another come to take your holy place?
Old man mumbling in his dotage, crying child, unborn?


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
name address date
I cannot remember
an eye for an eye
then and there my
this    is
your    se
cond    ch
ance    to
h i s t o r y
r e p e a t s
i t s s e l f
and a tooth
for a tooth
is a tooth:


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
I stand there under the high limbs of locust
watching my father point a black gun into the air
his arms steepled for the stillness
required to split the proverbial hair
with a BB. I would like to throw a red hat
to catch what will smack from the barrel
but instead the songbird drops fast—a warm
stone through liquid swimming between us.
The stink of yellow sulfur thick. And the twist
of his mouth, like tangled purple boughs
or crossed legs of what he never dreamed he'd hit.
Years after, I will admit only to so much. Blue
moon tomorrow. Do we ever get a second
chance? It's what I don't say that speaks loudest.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Eat thou and drink; to-morrow thou shalt die.
Surely the earth, that's wise being very old,
Needs not our help. Then loose me, love, and hold
Thy sultry hair up from my face; that I
May pour for thee this golden wine, brim-high,
Till round the glass thy fingers glow like gold.
We'll drown all hours: thy song, while hours are toll'd,
Shall leap, as fountains veil the changing sky.
Now kiss, and think that there are really those,
My own high-bosom'd beauty, who increase
Vain gold, vain lore, and yet might choose our way!
Through many years they toil; then on a day
They die not,—for their life was death,—but cease;
And round their narrow lips the mould falls close.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Stronger than alcohol, more great than song,
deep in whose reeds great elephants decay,
I, an island, sail, and my shoes toss
on a fragrant evening, fraught with sadness
bristling hate.
It’s true, I weep too much. Dawns break
slow kisses on the eyelids of the sea,
what other men sometimes have thought they’ve seen.
And since then I’ve been bathing in the poem
lifting her shadowy flowers up for me,
and hurled by hurricanes to a birdless place
the waving flags, nor pass by prison ships
O let me burst, and I be lost at sea!
and fall on my knees then, womanly.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Fire ran horrified
from its ashes.
In the afterglow,
cinematic shadows fled
from flesh and blood.
Scars appeared,
followed years later
by their wounds.
Blinks of red
dinged relentlessly,
but there was
nowhere to stop
for the train
pulling its wreckage.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
You may think, passer-by, that Fate
Is a pit-fall outside of yourself,
Around which you may walk by the use of foresight
And wisdom.
Thus you believe, viewing the lives of other men,
As one who in God-like fashion bends over an anthill,
Seeing how their difficulties could be avoided.
But pass on into life:
In time you shall see Fate approach you
In the shape of your own image in the mirror;
Or you shall sit alone by your own hearth,
And suddenly the chair by you shall hold a guest,
And you shall know that guest,
And read the authentic message of his eyes.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell;
Unto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell
Cast up thy Life's foam-fretted feet between;
Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen
Which had Life's form and Love's, but by my spell
Is now a shaken shadow intolerable,
Of ultimate things unutter'd the frail screen.
Mark me, how still I am! But should there dart
One moment through thy soul the soft surprise
Of that wing'd Peace which lulls the breath of sighs,—
Then shalt thou see me smile, and turn apart
Thy visage to mine ambush at thy heart
Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
You remember the Incredible Shrinking Man? I said.
Well, last night I dreamed I was him. It began the same way.
The shirt cuffs were the first thing that came to my attention,
drooping down over my knuckles in the bedroom mirror.
And my waistband and shoes were getting looser by the day.
Within weeks you could perch me on your knee like a male doll.
Later you would put me to bed in the empty matchbox.
You failed to watch for the spider that came to explore me.
I fought her with a darning needle, a button my shield.
She retreated from me on a thread. I followed her down
to the cellar. How I made my way back I’ll never know.
It took me days to travel over the quilt to your hand.
No longer a hand but an Alpine range of sleeping flesh.
I crawled into an open pore and entered your bloodstream.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Like as, to make our appetite more keen,
With eager compounds we our palate urge;
As, to prevent our maladies unseen,
We sicken to shun sickness when we purge;
Even so, being full of your ne’er-cloying sweetness,
To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding;
And, sick of welfare, found a kind of meetness
To be diseas’d, ere that there was true needing.
Thus policy in love, to anticipate
The ills that were not, grew to faults assur’d,
And brought to medicine a healthful state
Which, rank of goodness, would by ill be cur’d;
But thence I learn and find the lesson true,
Drugs poison him that so fell sick of you.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Life, like a marble block, is given to all,
A blank, inchoate mass of years and days,
Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays
Some shape of strength or symmetry to call;
One shatters it in bits to mend a wall;
One in a craftier hand the chisel lays,
And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’s gaze,
Carves it apace in toys fantastical.
But least is he who, with enchanted eyes
Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be,
Muses which god he shall immortalize
In the proud Parian’s perpetuity,
Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies
That the night cometh wherein none shall see.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Out of your whole life give but one moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it, – so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present, – condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense –
Merged in a moment which gives me at last
You around me for once, you beneath me, above me –
Me – sure that despite of time future, time past, –
This tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me!
How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet –
The moment eternal – just that and no more –
When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core
While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Psychoanalysis always looks for the egg in a basket that has been lost. *
*
* I sample sin as if it were the beginning of well-being. *
*
* I don't like Paradise as they probably don't have obsessions there. *
*
* If God absolves me he always does so for insufficient evidence. *
*
* Everyone is a friend of his own pathology. *
*
* When I raise a toast to madness,
I toast myself as well. *
*
* There are nights that don't ever happen.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
For Síle
I give thee the sun as guarantee
and the Egyptian faience beads
and the little silver oar that was gifted once
to an English harbor master.
I give thee the silk dress
with its triple-ruffled sleeves and
the cloaks with big hoods that fall full
though some are pulled in at a central button.
I give thee the little colored goats
that go down on their knees as penitents.
I give thee the death mask
and the plaster hand of Seán Ó Riada,
for he is among the best loved of the musicians.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
My ghostly fader, I me confess,
First to God and then to you,
That at a window, wot ye how,
I stale a kosse of gret swetness,
Which don was out avisiness—
But it is doon, not undoon, now.
My ghostly fader, I me confess,
First to God and then to you.
But I restore it shall, doutless,
Agein, if so be that I mow;
And that to God I make a vow,
And elles I axe foryefness.
My ghostly fader, I me confesse,
First to God and then to you.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
"F. . . the oven is an F"
Samantha Foggle, age 3
Oh, to hear the world with such clarity.
Such surety. To know the note
of your breakfast chat is B-flat minor.
That the ’57 Chevy stalled outside the
garage is a D. To recognize the Apricot
kitchen paint for what it is: F-sharp.
To understand the way you feel for him is G,definitely a G. And as you watch him
descend the scale of the front steps to his car
for work, the house quiets to an A.
The arpeggio of last night’s Every
Good Boy Deserves Favor
still ringing in your ears.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
His hand in hold so trigger-tight its blood
believes in ghosts. It clings with finger set
on steel and waits inside a dream of ducks.
The twilight burns into a rising arc
of eastern sky as sun reveals herself
too proud and instantly receives full-face
a splash of mallard flock. A shotgun blasts
the yellow into streaming pinks and gives
the creek its new-day taste of echoed blood.
Two green head ghosts fly through the pulse of dawn
upon a trigger’s touch. The creek empties
of sound. In silence human fingers find
wet feet of web and carry in each hand
a bird whose only cry comes in color.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
We walked through some heartache in '62.
Gary liked Teresa but Teresa
asked Elizabeth to tell Peter that
she really wanted to go out with him
but Peter had been making out with Jane
in the theater, celebrating their
one month anniversary, so that was
out, and even though Jane broke up with Pete,
Peter kept asking Gail to talk with Jane
which Gail wouldn't do because she'd told
Brenda that she thought that Peter was cute
but Brenda wasn't listening to a word,
wrapped up in lonely teardrops shed for Greg.
The waters of 8th grade were never still.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear respose for limbs with travel tir’d;
But then begins a journey in my head
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired:
For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see:
Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.
Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee, and for myself, no quiet find.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I seek, my weary travel’s end,
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say,
‘Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!’
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider lov’d not speed, being made from thee:
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on,
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,
Which heavily he answers with a groan,
More sharp to me than spurring to his side;
For that same groan doth put this in my mind,
My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
End of the day. A bar where you ought to leave a tip.
The green bird was saying pretty pretty pretty,
loved ones were walking home across the city.
I waved at the girl who waves her whip    ...
but please be certain I’m a citizen    ...
I take stuff to the dump    ...    or maybe it’s the tip?
I’m where the nitty really meets the gritty.
I know I find it hard to listen.
I read too much. I often need a drink.
It isn’t the world that makes us think,
it’s words that we can’t come up with.
Sure, I can work up fresh examples
and send them off to the committee.
But the poetry is in the bird. And in the pretty.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel,
or what life itself eventually reveals.
No more studies of kindness or courtesy,
nor grace or charity, all is needless now.
All is needless now, sky, world, family
grieving for their bundles of purity,
now beyond disgrace, failure, winter streets,
or whatever attacks, and then retreats.
Classrooms emptied of children’s things,
paper and paste, and love’s imaginings,
bundles of peace, Christmas-blessed
with the unborn and the dead at rest,
nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel
or what life itself eventually reveals.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck;
And yet methinks I have astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well
By oft predict that I in heaven find:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And constant stars in them I read such art
As ‘Truth and beauty shall together thrive,
If from thyself, to store thou wouldst convert’;
Or else of thee this I prognosticate:
‘Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.’


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
When the bed is empty, we pull the shades to block light,
light of resemblance to remembery, long light of waiting,
an impatience in the glows of it. The here of the now and the glow
that days make in the room, without the body but with the stench
of it. So we say, vacancy and abject,against the was, against
a philosophy of once and then not. Not-being against.
A child once grew here. As lines on a wall. As
growing without knowing what would one day not be. A
gnawing grows. Grew and was. Protection is curled. Motion-
less. I envy her in her room. Hers with paint and dolls and hand-
prints. Great green and glowing under blankets with a hand
that nurtures the heart of the mouth, purrs into mouth, loves
the heart. Heart beating within another—blushing blood—
God, the beating, lit, and doing what it does.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
No other man, unless it was Doc Hill,
Did more for people in this town than l.
And all the weak, the halt, the improvident
And those who could not pay flocked to me.
I was good-hearted, easy Doctor Meyers.
I was healthy, happy, in comfortable fortune,
Blest with a congenial mate, my children raised,
All wedded, doing well in the world.
And then one night, Minerva, the poetess,
Came to me in her trouble, crying.
I tried to help her out—she died—
They indicted me, the newspapers disgraced me,
My wife perished of a broken heart.
And pneumonia finished me.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
That thou hast her it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her, because thou know’st I love her;
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love’s gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross:
But here’s the joy; my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim,
And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim.
The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould,
Glint through their mildews like large cups of gold.
Among the wild rice in the still lagoon,
In monotone the lizard shrills his tune.
The wild goose, homing, seeks a sheltering,
Where rushes grow, and oozing lichens cling.
Late cranes with heavy wing, and lazy flight,
Sail up the silence with the nearing night.
And like a spirit, swathed in some soft veil,
Steals twilight and its shadows o’er the swale.
Hushed lie the sedges, and the vapours creep,
Thick, grey and humid, while the marshes sleep.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
When men shall find thy flower, thy glory pass,
And thou, with careful brow sitting alone,
Receivèd hast this message from thy glass,
That tells thee truth, and says that all is gone,
Fresh shalt thou see in me the wounds thou madest,
Though spent thy flame, in me the heat remaining,
I that have loved thee thus before thou fadest,
My faith shall wax, when thou art in thy waning.
The world shall find this miracle in me,
That fire can burn when all the matter’s spent;
Then what my faith hath been thyself shall see,
And that thou wast unkind thou mayst repent.
Thou mayst repent that thou hast scorned my tears,
When Winter snows upon thy golden hairs.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
My letters! all dead paper, ... mute and white ! —
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands which loose the string
And let them drop down on my knee to-night.
This said, ... he wished to have me in his sight
Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring
To come and touch my hand ... a simple thing,
Yet I wept for it! — this, ... the paper's light ...
Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed
As if God's future thundered on my past.
This said, I am thine — and so its ink has paled
With lying at my heart that beat too fast.
And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availed,
If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
You must not wonder, though you think it strange,
To see me hold my louring head so low,
And that mine eyes take no delight to range
About the gleams which on your face do grow.
The mouse which once hath broken out of trap
Is seldom ’ticèd with the trustless bait,
But lies aloof for fear of more mishap,
And feedeth still in doubt of deep deceit.
The scorchèd fly, which once hath ’scaped the flame,
Will hardly come to play again with fire,
Whereby I learn that grievous is the game
Which follows fancy dazzled by desire:
So that I wink or else hold down my head,
Because your blazing eyes my bale have bred.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Columns, arches, vaults: how he knew
The ways you promise what you lack;
And that your bodies, like your souls,
Always slip from our grasping hands.
Space is such a lure . . . Swift to disappoint,
As they raise and topple clouds, the sky's
Architects still offer more than ours,
Who only build a scaffolding of dreams.
He dreamed, all the same; but on that day,
He gave a better use to beauty's shapes:
He understood that form means to die.
And this, his final work, is a coin
With both sides bare. He made in stone,
Of this great room, the arrow and the bow.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
I stand in Walgreens while my mother sleeps.
The store is fluorescent and almost empty.
My father is ailing in a nursing home,
my friend is dying in the hospital.
What I want tonight is lipstick.
As pure a red as I can find—no coral
undertones, no rust or fawn. Just red.
Ignoring the salespeople, I untwist tubes
and scrawl each color on my wrist,
till the blue veins beneath my skin
disappear behind smeared bars. I select one.
Back in my mother's apartment, silence.
I limn my lips back out of my wan face.
There they are again: smacky and wanting.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
all you have to do
is show yourself
in case you hear us
we are so small
and fenceless in the shade
throw us a hook
when you can
touch the scribbled
child in the inferno
all you have to do
is show yourself a little
pin your dark
olive green parts
against the boulder


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow!
They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain,
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
What can I give thee back, O liberal
And princely giver, who hast brought the gold
And purple of thine heart, unstained, untold,
And laid them on the outside of the wall
For such as I to take or leave withal,
In unexpected largesse? am I cold,
Ungrateful, that for these most manifold
High gifts, I render nothing back at all?
Not so; not cold,—but very poor instead.
Ask God who knows.  For frequent tears have run
The colours from my life, and left so dead
And pale a stuff, it were not fitly done
To give the same as pillow to thy head.
Go farther! let it serve to trample on.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
How can I then return in happy plight,
That am debarre’d the benefit of rest?
When day’s oppression is not eas’d by night,
But day by night and night by day oppress’d,
And each, though enemies to either’s reign,
Do in consent shake hands to torture me,
The one by toil, the other to complain
How far I toil, still farther off from thee.
I tell the day, to please him thou art bright,
And dost him grace when clouds do blot the heaven:
So flatter I the swart-complexion’d night,
When sparkling stars twire not thou gild’st the even.
But day doth daily draw my sorrows longer,
And night doth nightly make grief’s length seem stronger.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
It may be esoteric and perverse
That I consult Pythagoras to hear
A music tuning in the universe.
My interest in his math of star and sphere
Has triggered theorems too far-fetched to solve.
They don't add up. But if I rack and toil
More in ether than a mortal coil,
It is to comprehend how you revolve,
By formulas of orbit, ellipse, and ring.
Dear son and daughter, if I seem to range
It is to chart the numbers spiraling
Between my life and yours until the strange
And seamless beauty of equations click
Solutions for the heart's arithmetic.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.
I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,
Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil'd searching of mortality;
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,
Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so!
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden's dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Did your father come home after fighting
through the week at work? Did the sweat change
to salt in his ears? Was that bitter white
grain the only music he’d hear? Is this why
you were quiet when other poets sang
of the black man’s beauty? Is this why
you choked on the tonsil of Negro Duty?
Were there as many offices for pain
as love? Should a black man never be shy?
Was your father a mountain twenty
shovels couldn’t bury? Was he a train
leaving a lone column of smoke? Was he
a black magnolia singing at your feet?
Was he a blackjack smashed against your throat?


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest
He who has found our hid security,
Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest,
And heard our word, ‘Who is so safe as we?’ We have found safety with all things undying,
The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,
The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,
And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.
We have built a house that is not for Time’s throwing.
We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.
War knows no power.
Safe shall be my going,
Secretly armed against all death’s endeavour;
Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Whether or not shadows are of the substance
such is the expectation I can
wait to surprise my vision as a wind
enters the valley: sudden and silent
in its arrival, drawing to full cry
the whorled invisibilities, glassen towers
freighted with sky-chaff; that, as barnstorming
powers, rammack the small
orchard; that well-steaded oaks
ride stolidly, that rake the light-leafed ash,
that glowing yew trees, cumbrous, heave aside.
Amidst and abroad tumultuous lumina,
regents, reagents, cloud-fêted, sun-ordained,
fly tally over hedgerows, across fields.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Things happen when you drink too much mescal.
One night, with not enough food in my belly,
he kept on buying.   I’m a girl who’ll fall
damn near in love with gratitude and, well, he
was hot and generous and so the least
that I could do was let him kiss me, hard
and soft and any way you want it, beast
and beauty, lime and salt—sweet Bacchus’ pards—
and when his friend showed up I felt so warm
and generous I let him kiss me too.
His buddy asked me if it was the worm
inside that makes me do the things I do.
I wasn’t sure which worm he meant, the one
I ate?   The one that eats at me alone?


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
a sower walks into the great hall
it's war out there, he says
and you awash in emptiness
you've sworn off your duty to sound the alarm
I've come in the name of fields
it's war out there
I walk out from that great hall
all four directions a boundless harvest scene
I start planning for war
rehearsing death
and the crops I burn
send up the wolf-smoke of warning fires
but something haunts me furiously:
he's sowing seed across marble floors


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Glitz girls in the spackle. Teen climbed
The boughed over stair. Stole lace to begin again
In darkness, a fingering salt. Print
Delighted the line to lined
Pink. Was doll-sized, weighted out. Was flat-reaped sigh
And dollar bin plaid. Fridays we stayed in
Till in coughed through with dry heat. Men
Grew approximate in their longing for something to mine.
Sippy cup of burn, acrylic camel, and melting kohl
Was a hiding past boyish. We shone with miraculous
Droll. Don’t try to kiss me, she was always saying. Older
Than a watch, the girl who pays starch to hush
Meat. Gargantuan between grown and still us,
I leave her orange street, my wanting ode


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
But be contented: when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee:
The earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My spirit is thine, the better part of me:
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being dead;
The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered.
The worth of that is that which it contains,
And that is this, and this with thee remains.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night,
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
She stands as pale as Parian statues stand;
Like Cleopatra when she turned at bay,
And felt her strength above the Roman sway,
And felt the aspic writhing in her hand.
Her face is steadfast toward the shadowy land,
For dim beyond it looms the light of day;
Her feet are steadfast; all the arduous way
That foot-track hath not wavered on the sand.
She stands there like a beacon thro' the night,
A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is;
She stands alone, a wonder deathly white;
She stands there patient, nerved with inner might,
Indomitable in her feebleness,
Her face and will athirst against the light.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air.
I am blind. I am unable to understand the dark
passages. I begin to speak of being deprived.
I believe that I am being kept in want. Who
governs me? Who is to say what I am,
and what I am not? I wish to be conscious
of myself. My frontiers are long and insecure.
I contract them. I cannot command them.
I determine myself not to desire what is
unattainable. I have a wound in my leg.
I am a schoolboy. A rule does not oppress me
if I impose it on myself. I assimilate it
into my substance. I can never be thwarted.
I cannot want it to be other than it is.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
I know that all beneath the moon decays,
And what by mortals in this world is brought,
In Time’s great periods shall return to nought;
That fairest states have fatal nights and days;
I know how all the Muse’s heavenly lays,
With toil of spright which are so dearly bought,
As idle sounds of few or none are sought,
And that nought lighter is than airy praise.
I know frail beauty like the purple flower,
To which one morn oft birth and death affords;
That love a jarring is of minds’ accords,
Where sense and will invassal reason’s power:
Know what I list, this all can not me move,
But that, O me! I both must write and love.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all ‘hues’ in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Why and by whose power were you sent?
What do you see that you may wish to steal?
Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies
Drink up all the light? What are you demanding
That we feel? Have you stolen something? Then
What is that leaping in your chest? What is
The nature of your mission? Do you seek
To offer a confession? Have you anything to do
With others brought by us to harm? Then
Why are you afraid? And why do you invade
Our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute
As ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess?
Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we
Fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Why & what is sweetness all alone?
Either that or it becomes, alas, fleeting,
Which actually helps, because of rhythm.
& there’s a pale intensity to truth, no matter
How pale it is on the levels we receive on.
I mean, the minute you invent a time interval
The more it seems to “jelly out” the excitation
Of accidents; zum Beispiel, “Saginaw, Michigan.”
After a while, we almost expect him or her
To inveigle us into a cafe without bay-breasted warblers.
It’s almost like we have a streak of orange-smell
Which nobody’ll pay for because they can’t talk to it,
Although that’s probably all wrong, or at least falsified
By its very mention, like gravity. Do you agree?


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I cry your mercy—pity—love! Aye, love!
Merciful love that tantalizes not,
One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,
Unmasked, and being seen—without a blot!
O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,—
Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom’s atom or I die,
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life’s purposes,—the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
We feel the volt inside our veins,
inside the vines, inside the rain,
and through the capillaries of
a tree. We feel the pulse above
in storms, vibrato of thunder,
the whispering rhythms of a river,
magnetic currents in the earth,
the alternating flow of breath,
the push of tides, reversing air
from caves, dilating hum and dance
of bees, the chant of auctioneer.
All oscillate together, or
they seem to, in this play of chance,
beneath the stars' indifference.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs:
As when those hinds that were transform'd to frogs
Rail'd at Latona's twin-born progeny
Which after held the sun and moon in fee.
But this is got by casting pearl to hogs,
That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry liberty;
For who loves that, must first be wise and good.
But from that mark how far they rove we see,
For all this waste of wealth and loss of blood.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
She was changing on the inside
it was true what had been written
The new syntax of love
both sucked and burned
The secret clung around them
She took in the smell
Walking down a road to nowhere
every sound was relevant
The sun fell behind them now
he seemed strangely moved
She would take her clothes off
for the camera
she said in plain english
but she wasn’t holding that snake


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Through Vasenka: a herd of boys runs.
With their icy hands they haul a policeman and for an apple a look they display the man on the asphalt.
Snow falls in his nostrils.
I watch him.
They circle his eyes with a red pencil.
They teach his neighbors to spit in two red holes.
I watch the snowflakes melt in their hair.
The neighbor aims in the red circle, spits.
I stand on a park bench and chew snow.
Boys walk west of Tedna, carrying snowflakes in their hair.
A neighbor aims in the hole, spits.
Walking by night with their arms lifted up from their bodies.
As if they were about to leave the earth.
And were trying out the wind.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Lo! in the orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty;
And having climb’d the steep-up heavenly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage:
But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,
Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day,
The eyes, ’fore duteous, now converted are
From his low tract, and look another way:
So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon:
Unlook’d, on diest unless thou get a son.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Cherry-lipt Adonis in his snowie shape,
Might not compare with his pure ivorie white,
On whose faire front a poet’s pen may write,
Whose roseate red excels the crimson grape,
His love-enticing delicate soft limbs,
Are rarely fram’d t’intrap poore gazine eies:
His cheeks, the lillie and carnation dies,
With lovely tincture which Apollo’s dims.
His lips ripe strawberries in nectar wet,
His mouth a Hive, his tongue a hony-combe,
Where Muses (like bees) make their mansion.
His teeth pure pearle in blushing correll set.
Oh how can such a body sinne-procuring,
Be slow to love, and quicke to hate, enduring?


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Muses that sing love's sensual empery,
And lovers kindling your enraged fires
At Cupid's bonfires burning in the eye,
Blown with the empty breath of vain desires;
You that prefer the painted cabinet
Before the wealthy jewels it doth store ye,
That all your joys in dying figures set,
And stain the living substance of your glory;
Abjure those joys, abhor their memory,
And let my love the honour'd subject be
Of love, and honour's complete history.
Your eyes were never yet let in to see
The majesty and riches of the mind,
But dwell in darkness; for your god is blind.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Crooks run the whole world, and the Dow just fell.
Crap rules the airwaves. All your best plans stall.
The air is dirty, and you don’t feel well.
Your wife won’t listen. Friends no longer call.
Sad songs from youth no longer cast a spell.
Cancer research has run into a wall.
Some inflated hack just won the Nobel.
You witness clear signs of decline and fall.
The neighbors are cold, and your house won’t sell.
Your cat has bad teeth. Your paychecks feel small.
Maybe you’re really sick. It’s hard to tell.
Up ahead, traffic has slowed to a crawl.
The world didn’t just start going to hell.
You just noticed for the first time, that’s all.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Think thou and act; to-morrow thou shalt die
Outstretch'd in the sun's warmth upon the shore,
Thou say'st: "Man's measur'd path is all gone o'er:
Up all his years, steeply, with strain and sigh,
Man clomb until he touch'd the truth; and I,
Even I, am he whom it was destin'd for."
How should this be? Art thou then so much more
Than they who sow'd, that thou shouldst reap thereby?
Nay, come up hither. From this wave-wash'd mound
Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me;
Then reach on with thy thought till it be drown'd.
Miles and miles distant though the last line be,
And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,—
Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
When I was three,
a tsunami hit town.
“Daddy, Daddy, save me,
don’t let me drown.”
He saved me
and my common-type dolls.
When I was sixteen,
another tsunami hit town.
I cried to my daddy,
“Daddy, Daddy, please save me,
don’t let me drown!”
But he let go of my hand!
I still dance
to what broke on my life.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.
His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
From child to youth; from youth to arduous man;
From lethargy to fever of the heart;
From faithful life to dream-dower'd days apart;
From trust to doubt; from doubt to brink of ban;—
Thus much of change in one swift cycle ran
Till now. Alas, the soul!—how soon must she
Accept her primal immortality,—
The flesh resume its dust whence it began?
O Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life!
O Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late,
Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath:
That when the peace is garner'd in from strife,
The work retriev'd, the will regenerate,
This soul may see thy face, O Lord of death!


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
So I'll speak ill of the dead. A was crooked,
planting the small left finger of the raccoon in the upholstery
before he sold the car. B made certain to point out Celia's
bewildered look before her pink slip came in the flimsy institution.
In the videos of C, a jejune overwhelmed the cast.
D built dollhouses. Even Lonnie down at Shell
found him less a man for it, the night they went off to see the stock
cars break. I wanted E's hair, but by the end it was no more. F
refused alms, pulling the man up by his shirt in the street, and
G sought rewards. Marybeth said H fondled her for sport.
Now you, I, Smokey, hell
bent on a village version of Club 21, embarrassed by our attentions.
Mistrust it was. Dig me a chamber of preparedness.
William T. Osborn, 1964-1993


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Far in a western brookland
That bred me long ago  The poplars stand and tremble
By pools I used to know.
There, in the windless night-time,
The wanderer, marvelling why,
Halts on the bridge to hearken
How soft the poplars sigh.
He hears: long since forgotten
In fields where I was known,
Here I lie down in London
And turn to rest alone.
There, by the starlit fences,
The wanderer halts and hears  My soul that lingers sighing
About the glimmering weirs.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Because the only view we have is the one
that looks down on the knees. Praise perspective.
Praise shared disdain. Praise space made by connective
tissue; the synaptic cleft; elbowroom
at the dinner table; polite conversation;
lies you push through your teeth. Because dissecting
a dog's heart won't change the way it thinks. Praise redirected
traffic. Praise the gnarled lip that defends
the gentle bones. Because your mother was
a seahorse. And to think of her thin is
to empty all the ice from the tea glasses;
to strain the soup by driving it through your hand.
Praise tablecloths; sway-back chairs; the plastic
folds that protect slice after slice of cheese.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
In syrup, in syrup,
In syrup we drown,
Who sell ourselves
With a sparkling smile.
Padded with pathos
Our winding sheet.
The bomb bounded
By buxom beauties.
Horror gelded
By the happy ending.
How can we swim
Who hold to our haloes?
Down we go, down
In syrup, in syrup.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Accuse me not, beseech thee, that I wear
Too calm and sad a face in front of thine;
For we two look two ways, and cannot shine
With the same sunlight on our brow and hair.
On me thou lookest with no doubting care,
As on a bee shut in a crystalline;
Since sorrow hath shut me safe in love’s divine,
And to spread wing and fly in the outer air
Were most impossible failure, if I strove
To fail so.  But I look on thee—on thee—
Beholding, besides love, the end of love,
Hearing oblivion beyond memory;
As one who sits and gazes from above,
Over the rivers to the bitter sea.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
I’m terrified of a number of fates,
Poisoned water under a tyrant’s wage,
Being fired for doing nothing, my parents dying,
Committing a thought like this to the page,
The splash of acid to the face
The Queens non-profit boss received
Leaving work one blue August evening. Hell’s
So eloquent and poetry’s no fate at all
Unless you count the story of the divided sea
Waiting to wash its assassins away.
Says the Pharaoh, “That’s so sad.”
But that story is less fate than news, whereas
That Queens boss? Permanently burned, the Times
Says one eye won’t stop weeping.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, [......] these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge?
Is this thy body's end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And,
Death once dead, there's no more dying then.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
God started small                     At the first showdown
between good and evil       God didn’t come at anyone
like a cowboy       God didn’t open with solar flares
or asteroids       or mass extinction            or planetary heat death
God didn’t outgun anyone               God outmanned them
God made man        in the face of the beast
And in the face of the beast      God made     —from inside
the great and gaping maw         while languishing
in the hot damp                           In the face of that
great terror          God summoned the smallest—
adrenaline        serotonin        hemoglobin        oxytocin        motes
of possibility      God started by making—
light into land masses      sand into vessels      preservation
as civilization   and sometimes   God won


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!
What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never!
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted,
In the distraction of this madding fever!
O benefit of ill! now I find true
That better is, by evil still made better;
And ruin’d love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
So I return rebuk’d to my content,
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
In vain to me the smiling Mornings shine,
And reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fire;
The birds in vain their amorous descant join;
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire;
These ears, alas! for other notes repine,
A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.
Yet Morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
To warm their little loves the birds complain;
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
And weep the more because I weep in vain.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,
Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,
The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.
Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,
The West refused them, and the East abhorred.
No anchorage the known world could afford,
Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.
Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year,
A virgin world where doors of sunset part,
Saying, "Ho, all who weary, enter here!
There falls each ancient barrier that the art
Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear
Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!"


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you.
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But like a sad slave, stay and think of nought,
Save, where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that in your will
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
So is it not with me as with that Muse,
Stirr’d by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Making a couplement of proud compare.
With sun and moon, with earth and sea’s rich gems,
With April’s first-born flowers, and all things rare,
That heaven’s air in this huge rondure hems.
O! let me, true in love, but truly write,
And then believe me, my love is as fair
As any mother’s child, though not so bright
As those gold candles fix’d in heaven’s air:
Let them say more that like of hearsay well;
I will not praise that purpose not to sell.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Up the dog bounds to the window, baying
like a basset his doleful, tearing sounds
from the belly, as if mourning a dead king, and now he’s howling like a beagle – yips, brays,
gagging growls – and scratching the sill paintless,
that’s how much he’s missed you, the two of you, both of you, mother and daughter, my wife
and child.
All week he’s curled at my feet,
warming himself and me watching more TV, or wandered the lonely rooms, my dog shadow,
who like a poodle now hops, amped-up windup
maniac yo-yo with matted curls and snot nose smearing the panes, having heard another car
like yours taking its grinding turn down
our block, or a school bus, or bird-squawk, that’s how much he’s missed you, good dog,
companion dog, dog-of-all-types, most excellent dog
I told you once and for all we should never get.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Loving you less than life, a little less
Than bitter-sweet upon a broken wall
Or brush-wood smoke in autumn, I confess
I cannot swear I love you not at all.
For there is that about you in this light—
A yellow darkness, sinister of rain—
Which sturdily recalls my stubborn sight
To dwell on you, and dwell on you again.
And I am made aware of many a week
I shall consume, remembering in what way
Your brown hair grows about your brow and cheek
And what divine absurdities you say:
Till all the world, and I, and surely you,
Will know I love you, whether or not I do.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
When last we parted, thou wert young and fair,
How beautiful let fond remembrance say!
Alas! since then old time has stolen away
Full thirty years, leaving my temples bare.—
So has it perished like a thing of air,
The dream of love and youth!— now both are grey
Yet still remembering that delightful day,
Though time with his cold touch has blanched my hair,
Though I have suffered many years of pain
Since then, though I did never think to live
To hear that voice or see those eyes again,
I can a sad but cordial greeting give,
And for thy welfare breathe as warm a prayer—
As when I loved thee young and fair.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can tell when I may dine again.
No man can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
One foot down, then hop! It's hot.
Good things for the ones that's got.
Another jump, now to the left.
Everybody for hisself.
In the air, now both feet down.
Since you black, don't stick around.
Food is gone, the rent is due,
Curse and cry and then jump two.
All the people out of work,
Hold for three, then twist and jerk.
Cross the line, they count you out.
That's what hopping's all about.
Both feet flat, the game is done.
They think I lost. I think I won.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Inside every world there is another world trying to get out,
and there is something in you that would like to discount this world.
The stars could rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts,
and you would not know if you were ruining your life or beginning a real one.
You could claim professional fondness for the world around you;
the pictures would dissolve under the paint coming alive,
and you would only feel a phantom skip of the heart, absorbed so in the colors.
Your disbelief is a later novel emerging in the long, long shadow of an earlier one—
is this the great world, which is whatever is the case?
The sustained helplessness you feel in the long emptiness of days is matched
by the new suspiciousness and wrath you wake to each morning.
Isn’t this a relationship with your death, too, to fall in love with your inscrutable life?
Your teeth fill with cavities. There is always unearned happiness for some,
and the criminal feeling of solitude. Always, everyone lies about his life.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
His piercing pince-nez. Some dim frieze
Hands point to a dim frieze, in the dark night.
In the book of his music the corners have straightened:
Which owe their presence to our sleeping hands.
The ox-blood from the hands which play
For fire for warmth for hands for growth
Is there room in the room that you room in?
Upon his structured tomb:
Still they mean something. For the dance
And the architecture.
Weave among incidents
May be portentous to him
We are the sleeping fragments of his sky,
Wind giving presence to fragments.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Still will I harvest beauty where it grows:
In coloured fungus and the spotted fog
Surprised on foods forgotten; in ditch and bog
Filmed brilliant with irregular rainbows
Of rust and oil, where half a city throws
Its empty tins; and in some spongy log
Whence headlong leaps the oozy emerald frog. . . .
And a black pupil in the green scum shows.
Her the inhabiter of divers places
Surmising at all doors, I push them all.
Oh, you that fearful of a creaking hinge
Turn back forevermore with craven faces,
I tell you Beauty bears an ultra fringe
Unguessed of you upon her gossamer shawl!


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
My heart is a fancy place
Where giant reddish-purple cauliflowers
& white ones in French & English are outside
Waiting to welcome you to a boat
Over the low black river for a big dinner
There's alot of choice among the foods
Even a tortured lamb served in pieces
En croute on a plate so hot as a rack
Of clouds blown over the cold filthy river
We are entitled to see anytime while we
Use the tablecovers to love each other
Publicly dishing out imitative luxuries
To show off poetry's extreme generosity
Then home in the heart of a big limousine


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-raz’d,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded, to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate:
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death which cannot choose
But weep to have, that which it fears to lose.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
It smiles to see me
Still in my bathrobe.
It sits in my lap
And will not let me rise.
Now it is kissing my eyes.
Arms enfold me, arms
Pale with a thick down.
It seems I am falling asleep
To the sound of a story
Being read me.
This is the story.
Weeks have passed
Since first I lifted my hand
To set it down.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Against that time, if ever that time come,
When I shall see thee frown on my defects,
When as thy love hath cast his utmost sum,
Call’d to that audit by advis’d respects;
Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass,
And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye,
When love, converted from the thing it was,
Shall reasons find of settled gravity;
Against that time do I ensconce me here,
Within the knowledge of mine own desert,
And this my hand, against my self uprear,
To guard the lawful reasons on thy part:
To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws,
Since why to love I can allege no cause.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
The small grey cloudy louse that nests in my beard
Is not, as some have called it, ‘a pearl of God’ —
No, it is a fiery tormentor
Waking me at two a.m.
Or thereabouts, when the lights are still on
In the houses in the pa, to go across thick grass
Wet with rain, feet cold, to kneel
For an hour or two in front of the red flickering
Tabernacle light — what He sees inside
My meandering mind I can only guess —
A madman, a nobody, a raconteur
Whom He can joke with — ‘Lord,’ I ask Him,
‘Do You or don’t You expect me to put up with lice?’
His silent laugh still shakes the hills at dawn.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
The fish are drifting calmly in their tank
between the green reeds, lit by a white glow
that passes for the sun. Blindly, the blank
glass that holds them in displays their slow
progress from end to end, familiar rocks
set into the gravel, murmuring rows
of filters, a universe the flying fox
and glass cats, Congo tetras, bristle-nose
pleocostemus all take for granted. Yet
the platys, gold and red, persist in leaping
occasionally, as if they can't quite let
alone a possibility—of wings,
maybe, once they reach the air? They die
on the rug. We find them there, eyes open in surprise.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Like a loose island on the wide expanse,
Unconscious floating on the fickle sea,
Herself her all, she lives in privacy;
Her waking life as lonely as a trance,
Doom’d to behold the universal dance,
And never hear the music which expounds
The solemn step, coy slide, the merry bounds.
The vague, mute language of the countenance.
In vain for her I smooth my antic rhyme;
She cannot hear it. All her little being
Concentrated in her solitary seeing—
What can she know of beauty or sublime?
And yet methinks she looks so calm and good,
God must be with her in her solitude!


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!
How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!
For me wilt thou renew the withered rose,
And clear my painful path of pointed thorn?
Ah come, sweet nymph! in smiles and softness drest,
Like the young hours that lead the tender year
Enchantress come! and charm my cares to rest:
Alas! the flatterer flies, and will not hear!
A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain,
Must I a sad existence still deplore?
Lo! the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain,
‘For me the vernal garland blooms no more.’
Come then, ‘pale Misery’s love!’ be thou my cure,
And I will bless thee, who though slow art sure.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
That you were once unkind befriends me now,
And for that sorrow, which I then did feel,
Needs must I under my transgression bow,
Unless my nerves were brass or hammer’d steel.
For if you were by my unkindness shaken,
As I by yours, you’ve pass’d a hell of time;
And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken
To weigh how once I suffer’d in your crime.
O! that our night of woe might have remember’d
My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits,
And soon to you, as you to me, then tender’d
The humble salve, which wounded bosoms fits!
But that your trespass now becomes a fee;
Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,
Now is the time that face should form another,
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live rememb’red not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet-season’d showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As ’twixt a miser and his wealth is found.
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then better’d that the world may see my pleasure:
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by and by clean starved for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight,
Save what is had, or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,
Or gluttoning on all, or all away.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held.
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies—
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days—
To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use
If thou couldst answer "This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse",
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Down the long hall she glistens like a star,
The foam-born mother of Love, transfixed to stone,
Yet none the less immortal, breathing on.
Time's brutal hand hath maimed but could not mar.
When first the enthralled enchantress from afar
Dazzled mine eyes, I saw not her alone,
Serenely poised on her world-worshipped throne,
As when she guided once her dove-drawn car,—
But at her feet a pale, death-stricken Jew,
Her life adorer, sobbed farewell to love.
Here Heine wept! Here still he weeps anew,
Nor ever shall his shadow lift or move,
While mourns one ardent heart, one poet-brain,
For vanished Hellas and Hebraic pain.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
That thou art blam’d shall not be thy defect,
For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair;
The ornament of beauty is suspect,
A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.
So thou be good, slander doth but approve
Thy worth the greater being woo’d of time;
For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love,
And thou present’st a pure unstained prime.
Thou hast passed by the ambush of young days
Either not assail’d, or victor being charg’d;
Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise,
To tie up envy, evermore enlarg’d,
If some suspect of ill mask’d not thy show,
Then thou alone kingdoms of hearts shouldst owe.