Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day,
Didst make thy triumph over death and sin:
And having harrow'd hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win:
This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin,
And grant that we for whom thou diddest die,
Being with thy dear blood clean wash'd from sin,
May live for ever in felicity.
And that thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love thee for the same again:
And for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy,
With love may one another entertain.
So let us love, dear love, like as we ought,
Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Were’t aught to me I bore the canopy,
With my extern the outward honouring,
Or laid great bases for eternity,
Which proves more short than waste or ruining?
Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour
Lose all and more by paying too much rent
For compound sweet; forgoing simple savour,
Pitiful thrivers, in their gazing spent?
No; let me be obsequious in thy heart,
And take thou my oblation, poor but free,
Which is not mix’d with seconds, knows no art,
But mutual render, only me for thee.
Hence, thou suborned informer! a true soul
When most impeach’d, stands least in thy control.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Are there two things, of all which men possess,
That are so like each other and so near,
As mutual Love seems like to Happiness?
Dear Asra, woman beyond utterance dear!
This love which ever welling at my heart,
Now in its living fount doth heave and fall,
Now overflowing pours thro’ every part
Of all my frame, and fills and changes all,
Like vernal waters springing up through snow,
This Love that seeming great beyond the power
Of growth, yet seemeth ever more to grow,
Could I transmute the whole to one rich Dower
Of Happy Life, and give it all to Thee,
Thy lot, methinks, were Heaven, thy age, Eternity!


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store   and the gas station and the green market and   Hurry up honey,
I say, hurry,   as she runs along two or three steps behind me   her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.
Where do I want her to hurry to?
To her grave?
To mine?
Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done,
I say to her,
Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—   you walk ahead of me.
You be the mother.
And,
Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing.
Hurry up now darling, she says,   hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I woke. You were lying beside me in the double bed,
prone, your long dark hair fanned out over the downy pillow.
I’d been dreaming we stood on a beach an ocean away
watching the waves purl into their troughs and tumble over.
Knit one, purl two, you said. Something in your voice made me think
of women knitting by the guillotine. Your eyes met mine.
The fetch of a wave is the distance it travels, you said,
from where it is born at sea to where it founders to shore.
I must go back to where it all began. You waded in
thigh-deep, waist-deep, breast-deep, head-deep, until you disappeared.
I lay there and thought how glad I was to find you again.
You stirred in the bed and moaned something. I heard a footfall
on the landing, the rasp of a man’s cough. He put his head
around the door. He had my face. I woke. You were not there.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
This was the winter mother told time by my heart
ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest.
This was the fifties & we were living on nothing
& what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse,
what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart
of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists
& each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass,
what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her
own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed
with rope, in the grip of a rage she came, a black woman,
into our white lives, like a splinter, & stayed. Charming
& brilliantly condescending, she leaned down to kiss “the baby,”
& hissed my little princess & hushed the Jordan & set the chariots
on the golden streets & Mother, I cried to her, & went out like a light.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell;
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.


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


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I was reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s new piece
In The Atlantic — it was the one about
President Obama’s decision not
To be persuaded by a commonplace
That our credibility hinges on the use
Of swift and massive lethal force despite
Pressure even from his own Cabinet
Appalled that Assad shelled Ghouta with sarin gas —
When I thought of your poem on the way
Of denial, “Via Negativa,” whose lines
Celebrated their (your rhyme) reticence.
Why am I even talking this way to you?
I watched you being buried, yet in the end
I wonder if I had ever been your friend.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Can it be right to give what I can give?
To let thee sit beneath the fall of tears
As salt as mine, and hear the sighing years
Re-sighing on my lips renunciative
Through those infrequent smiles which fail to live
For all thy adjurations?  O my fears,
That this can scarce be right!  We are not peers
So to be lovers; and I own, and grieve,
That givers of such gifts as mine are, must
Be counted with the ungenerous.  Out, alas!
I will not soil thy purple with my dust,
Nor breathe my poison on thy Venice-glass,
Nor give thee any love—which were unjust.
Beloved, I only love thee! let it pass.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate,
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thyself thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgement making.
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I will die in Paris with a rainstorm,
on a day I already remember,
I will die in Paris—and I don't shy away—
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn.
It will be Thursday, because today, Thursday, as I prose
these lines, I've put on my humeri in a bad mood,
and, today like never before, I've turned back,
with all of my road, to see myself alone.
César Vallejo has died; they kept hitting him,
everyone, even though he does nothing to them,
they gave it to him hard with a club and hard
also with a rope; witnesses are
the Thursday days and the humerus bones,
the solitude, the rain, the roads. . .


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
O! in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose.
That tongue that tells the story of thy days,
Making lascivious comments on thy sport,
Cannot dispraise, but in a kind of praise;
Naming thy name, blesses an ill report.
O! what a mansion have those vices got
Which for their habitation chose out thee,
Where beauty’s veil doth cover every blot
And all things turns to fair that eyes can see!
Take heed, dear heart, of this large privilege;
The hardest knife ill-us’d doth lose his edge.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface,
In thee thy summer, ere thou be distill’d:
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-kill’d.
That use is not forbidden usury,
Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
That’s for thyself to breed another thee,
Or ten times happier, be it ten for one;
Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,
If ten of thine ten times refigur’d thee:
Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?
Be not self-will’d, for thou art much too fair
To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
O! from what power hast thou this powerful might,
With insufficiency my heart to sway?
To make me give the lie to my true sight,
And swear that brightness doth not grace the day?
Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantise of skill,
That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?
Who taught thee how to make me love thee more,
The more I hear and see just cause of hate?
O! though I love what others do abhor,
With others thou shouldst not abhor my state:
If thy unworthiness rais’d love in me,
More worthy I to be belov’d of thee.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
The cruelty of ages past affects us now
Whoever it was who lived here lived a mean life
Each door has locks designed for keys unknown
Our living room was once somebody’s home
Our bedroom, someone’s only room
Our kitchen had a hasp upon its door.
Door to a kitchen?
And our lives are hasped and boundaried
Because of ancient locks and madnesses
Of slumlord greed and desperate privacies
Which one is madness? Depends on who you are.
We find we cannot stay, the both of us, in the same room
Dance, like electrons, out of each other’s way.
The cruelties of ages past affect us now


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
Crooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand.
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Seeing photos
of ancestors
a century past
is like looking
at your own
fingerprints—
circles
and lines
you can't
recognize
until someone else
with a stranger's eye
looks close and says
that's you.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white.
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead
The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
And yet, because thou overcomest so,
Because thou art more noble and like a king,
Thou canst prevail against my fears and fling
Thy purple round me, till my heart shall grow
Too close against thine heart henceforth to know
How it shook when alone.  Why, conquering
May prove as lordly and complete a thing
In lifting upward, as in crushing low!
And as a vanquished soldier yields his sword
To one who lifts him from the bloody earth,
Even so, Belovëd, I at last record,
Here ends my strife.  If thou invite me forth,
I rise above abasement at the word.
Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth!


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Why do you subdue yourself in golds and purples?
Why do you dim yourself with folded silks?
Do you not see that I can buy brocades in any draper’s shop,
And that I am choked in the twilight of all these colors.
How pale you would be, and startling—
How quiet;
But your curves would spring upward
Like a clear jet of flung water,
You would quiver like a shot-up spray of water,
You would waver, and relapse, and tremble.
And I too should tremble,
Watching.
Murex-dyes and tinsel—
And yet I think I could bear your beauty unshaded.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
We were farther and further.
More was the word we used for harder.
Lost was our standard-bearer.
Our gods were fallen faster,
and fallen larger.
The day was duller, duller
was disaster. Our charge was error.
Instead of leader we had louder,
instead of lover, never. And over this river
broke the winter’s black weather.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore,
Night o'er the ocean settles, dark and mute,
Save where is heard the repercussive roar
Of drowsy billows, on the rugged foot
Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone
Of seamen, in the anchored bark, that tell
The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone,
Singing the hour, and bidding "strike the bell."
All is black shadow, but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar, the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Mislead the pilgrim; such the dubious ray
That wavering reason lends, in life's long darkling way.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I have lost, and lately, these
Many dainty mistresses:
Stately Julia, prime of all;
Sappho next, a principal;
Smooth Anthea, for a skin
White, and heaven-like crystalline;
Sweet Electra, and the choice
Myrrha, for the lute, and voice;
Next, Corinna, for her wit,
And the graceful use of it;
With Perilla; all are gone;
Only Herrick's left alone
For to number sorrow by
Their departures hence, and die.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Of this worlds Theatre in which we stay,
My love lyke the Spectator ydly sits
Beholding me that all the pageants play,
Disguysing diversly my troubled wits.
Sometimes I joy when glad occasion fits,
And mask in myrth lyke to a Comedy:
Soone after when my joy to sorrow flits,
I waile and make my woes a Tragedy.
Yet she beholding me with constant eye,
Delights not in my merth nor rues my smart:
But when I laugh she mocks, and when I cry
She laughes, and hardens evermore her hart.
What then can move her? if not merth nor mone,
She is no woman, but a sencelesse stone.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
The twilight is the morning of his day.
While Sleep drops seaward from the fading shore,
With purpling sail and dip of silver oar,
He cheers the shadowed time with roundelay,
Until the dark east softens into gray.
Now as the noisy hours are coming—hark!
His song dies gently—it is growing dark—
His night, with its one star, is on the way!
Faintly the light breaks over the blowing oats—
Sleep, little brother, sleep: I am astir.
We worship Song, and servants are of her—
I in the bright hours, thou in shadow-time:
Lead thou the starlit night with merry notes,
And I will lead the clamoring day with rhyme.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
O how I faint when I of you do write,
Knowing a better spirit doth use your name,
And in the praise thereof spends all his might,
To make me tongue-tied speaking of your fame!
But since your worth, wide as the ocean is,
The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,
My saucy bark, inferior far to his,
On your broad main doth wilfully appear.
Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,
Whilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride;
Or, being wrack’d, I am a worthless boat,
He of tall building, and of goodly pride:
Then if he thrive and I be cast away,
The worst was this: my love was my decay.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I accompany this life’s events like a personal journalist:
“Little did she know when she got in the car that afternoon ...”;
or “Despite inauspicious beginnings,
this was to be their happiest year.”
Little did I expect that our horoscopes would prove true.
And how could we foresee an answer to
that frankly secular prayer, we with so little faith
as to be false prophets to our most fortunate gifts.
I am glad when doom fails. Inept apocalypse
is a specialty of the times: the suffering of the rich
at the hand of riches; the second and third comings of wars.
Shouldn’t we refuse prediction
that the untried today is guilty, that immeasurable
as this child’s hope is, it will break tomorrow?


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
The backyard is one white sheet
Where we read in the bird tracks
The songs we hear. Delicate
Sparrow, heavier cardinal,
Filigree threads of chickadee.
And wing patterns where one flew
Low, then up and away, gone
To the woods but calling out
Clearly its bright epigrams.
More snow promised for tonight.
The postal van is stalled
In the road again, the mail
Will be late and any good news
Will reach us by hand.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, callingCome here
Come here, little one


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
In the very night of movement where I
sought a sequential self –
The sea as blood, thought as
Earth that changes the sea
Changes the fishes in it
for the fortunes of landscapes
are in the fantasies
of architecture
H —        taught to sing
siren scales by ear
by rote or immersion
abroad
In the discrepancy of double exposure
Casts of light crack time’s microscope


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
No more be griev’d at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud:
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are;
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense;
Thy adverse party is thy advocate,
And ’gainst myself a lawful plea commence:
Such civil war is in my love and hate,
That I an accessary needs must be,
To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed:
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O! love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love, loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Survival is the final offer
that arrives at the eleventh hour
just when pain to the tenth power
would kill you with another ninth degree.
By then, relief strikes you brief as an eighth note;
you wear doom proudly; it's your seventh seal.
But life whispers through your sixth sense
of what might await you in some fifth dimension
where miracle is saved for the fourth quarter.
Tricked, you sigh and rise on the third day.
You know better, but with no second thought,
risk that first step—absurd as first love at first sight—
as if you were back at ground zero, as if it cost
nothing, as if this were not the last laugh.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
A personal lens: glass bending rays
That gave one that day’s news
Saying each and every day,
Just remember you are standing
On a planet that’s evolving.
How beautiful, she thought, what distance does
For water, the view from above or afar.
In last night’s dream, they were back again
At the beginning. She was a child
And he was a child.
A plane lit down and left her there.
Cold whitening the white sky whiter.
Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world
To be a sea.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
I grant thou wert not married to my Muse,
And therefore mayst without attaint o’erlook
The dedicated words which writers use
Of their fair subject, blessing every book.
Thou art as fair in knowledge as in hue,
Finding thy worth a limit past my praise;
And therefore art enforced to seek anew
Some fresher stamp of the time-bettering days.
And do so, love; yet when they have devis’d,
What strained touches rhetoric can lend,
Thou truly fair, wert truly sympathiz’d
In true plain words, by thy true-telling friend;
And their gross painting might be better us’d
Where cheeks need blood; in thee it is abus’d.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
You would extend the mind beyond the act,
Furious, bending, suffering in thin
And unpoetic dicta; you have been
Forced by hypothesis to fiercer fact.
As metal singing hard, with firmness racked,
You formulate our passion; and behind
In some harsh moment nowise of the mind
Lie the old meanings your advance has packed.
No man can hold existence in the head.
I, too, have known the anguish of the right
Amid this net of mathematic dearth,
And the brain throbbing like a ship at night:
Have faced with old unmitigated dread
The hard familiar wrinkles of the earth.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Against my love shall be as I am now,
With Time’s injurious hand crush’d and o’erworn;
When hours have drain’d his blood and fill’d his brow
With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
Hath travell’d on to age’s steepy night;
And all those beauties whereof now he’s king
Are vanishing, or vanished out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding age’s cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life:
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
We meet—sometimes—between the dry hours,
Between clefts in the involuntary plan,
Refusing to think of rent or food—how
Civic the slick to satisfied from man.
And Democratic. A Lucky Strike each, we
Sponge each other off, while what's greyed
In and grey slinks ashamed down the drain.
No need to articulate great restraint,
No need to see each other's mouth lip
The obvious. Giddy. Fingers garnished
With fumes of onions and garlic, I slip
Back into my shift, then watch her hands—wordless—
Reattach her stockings to the martyred
Rubber moons wavering at her garter.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
The land was there before us
Was the land. Then things
Began happening fast. Because
The bombs us have always work
Sometimes it makes me think
God must be one of us. Because
Us has saved the world. Us gave it
A particular set of regulations
Based on 1) undisputable acumen.
carnivorous fortunes, delicately
Referred to here as “bull market”
And (of course) other irrational factors
Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps,
Our man in Saigon   Lima   Tokyo   etc   etc


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their body’s force,
Some in their garments though new-fangled ill;
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;
And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,
Wherein it finds a joy above the rest:
But these particulars are not my measure,
All these I better in one general best.
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments’ costs,
Of more delight than hawks and horses be;
And having thee, of all men’s pride I boast:
Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take
All this away, and me most wretched make.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Had I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs
Be echoed swiftly through that ivory shell
Thine ear, and find thy gentle heart; so well
Would passion arm me for the enterprise;
But ah! I am no knight whose foeman dies;
No cuirass glistens on my bosom’s swell;
I am no happy shepherd of the dell
Whose lips have trembled with a maiden’s eyes.
Yet must I dote upon thee—call thee sweet,
Sweeter by far than Hybla’s honied roses
When steep’d in dew rich to intoxication.
Ah! I will taste that dew, for me ‘tis meet,
And when the moon her pallid face discloses,
I’ll gather some by spells, and incantation.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea,
Or in the wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
No voice is hush’d—no life treads silently,
But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,
That never spoke, over the idle ground:
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls,
And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
I'm sitting here on the old patio
beside your absence. It is a black well.
We'd be playing, now. . . I can hear Mama yell
"Boys! Calm down!" We'd laugh, and off I'd go
to hide where you'd never look. . . under the stairs,
in the hall, the attic. . . Then you'd do the same.
Miguel, we were too good at that game.
Everything would always end in tears.
No one was laughing on that August night
you went to hide away again, so late
it was almost dawn. But now your brother's through
with this hunting and hunting and never finding you.
The shadows crowd him. Miguel, will you hurry
and show yourself? Mama will only worry.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
But do thy worst to steal thyself away,
For term of life thou art assured mine;
And life no longer than thy love will stay,
For it depends upon that love of thine.
Then need I not to fear the worst of wrongs,
When in the least of them my life hath end.
I see a better state to me belongs
Than that which on thy humour doth depend:
Thou canst not vex me with inconstant mind,
Since that my life on thy revolt doth lie.
O! what a happy title do I find,
Happy to have thy love, happy to die!
But what’s so blessed-fair that fears no blot?
Thou mayst be false, and yet I know it not.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
My cousin, Milton, worked for a cable company.
The boy I knew when we were children
had fists that were often clenched, his face set like
an old man whose life had been so hard,
it hardened him. But the man's hands opened to let
more of the world in. He sent the funniest
cards to family and friends at Christmas, laid down
cable so others could connect. Yet, he lived
alone, kept to himself much of the time, so when
his sister found his body, he'd been gone
a good while. He died young at fifty-seven, without
fuss or bother. No sitting by the bedside
or feeding him soup. He just laid himself down like
a trunk line and let the signal pass through.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Blessed assurance,
Jesus is mine!
O what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood!
Chorus:
This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Saviour all the day long.
Perfect submission, perfect delight,
Visions of rapture now burst on my sight;
Angels descending bring from above Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.
Perfect submission, all is at rest,
I in my Saviour am happy and blest,—  Watching and waiting, looking above,
Filled with His goodness, lost in His love.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
With her hair closely cropped up to the nape
Like Dorian Apollo’s, the girl lay on the narrow
Pallet, keeping her limbs stiffly frozen
Within a heavy cloud she could not escape...
Artemis emptied her quiver—every arrow
Shot through her body. And though very soon
She’d be no virgin, like cold honeycomb,
Her virgin thighs still kept her pleasure sealed...
As if to the arena, the youth came
Oiled with myrrh, and like a wrestler kneeled
To pin her down; and although he broke past
Her arms that she had thrust against his chest,
Only much later, with one cry, face to face,
Did they join lips, and out of their sweat, embrace...


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Europe: 1944
as regarded from a great distance
Impersonal the aim
Where giant movements tend;
Each man appears the same;
Friend vanishes from friend.
In the long path of lead
That changes place like light
No shape of hand or head
Means anything tonight.
Only the common will
For which explosion spoke;
And stiff on field and hill
The dark blood of the folk.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth;
For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more,
Entitled in thy parts, do crowned sit,
I make my love engrafted, to this store:
So then I am not lame, poor, nor despis’d,
Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give
That I in thy abundance am suffic’d,
And by a part of all thy glory live.
Look what is best, that best I wish in thee:
This wish I have; then ten times happy me!


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
This holy season, fit to fast and pray,
Men to devotion ought to be inclin'd:
Therefore I likewise on so holy day,
For my sweet saint some service fit will find.
Her temple fair is built within my mind,
In which her glorious image placed is,
On which my thoughts do day and night attend,
Like sacred priests that never think amiss.
There I to her as th' author of my bliss,
Will build an altar to appease her ire:
And on the same my heart will sacrifice,
Burning in flames of pure and chaste desire:
The which vouchsafe, O goddess, to accept,
Amongst thy dearest relics to be kept.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
I joy to see how in your drawen work,
Your selfe unto the Bee ye doe compare;
And me unto the Spyder that doth lurke,
In close awayt to catch her unaware.
Right so your selfe were caught in cunning snare
Of a deare for, and thralled to his love:
In whose streight bands ye now captived are
So firmely, that ye never may remove.
But as your whole worke is woven all about,
With woodbynd flowers and fragrant Enlantine:
So sweet your prison you in time shall prove,
With many deare delights bedecked fyne,
And all thensforth eternall peace shall see
Betweene the Spyder and the gentle Bee.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
As apparent as the rest, the asphalt cracks
are crowded with yellow weeds, the rust goes
beyond its bleeding color, and the lot's rails,
battered by cars, cast larger bars by noon.
On one side of the market someone painted
a row of flower pots, hanging geraniums
for the locals who must now go across town.
As apparent as the rest, El Tigre walks upright,
wears a tiny sombrero and sarape, and pushes
a grocery cart full of food. His painted stripes
are starting to flake like the bounty he wheels
for the families drifting into the parking lot
off 3rd Street and next to the train station
still waiting to the retrofitted for the big one.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
To push and push with raw pink claws like
hands of shin. To tunnel my love through wet
earth, wet stars — no one needs the underneath
like me. I give you permission to
grip me. To patrol the worm-drench of
my thinking. To bite a worm’s head and cure
the rest as cache. Your flesh, my flesh, your dead
as dead, buried like a feeling. To push through
that wet, a scrum of worms whittling
my skin like a premonition. To have pushed
mountains into hills, ragged sooth from the
slid wall of healing. “Nothing,”
said the suicide, “is as sad as recovery.”
To work myself forward like a noun or an entry.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain;
Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express
The manner of my pity-wanting pain.
If I might teach thee wit, better it were,
Though not to love, yet love to tell me so,
As testy sick men, when their deaths be near,
No news but health from their physicians know.
For, if I should despair, I should grow mad,
And in my madness might speak ill of thee;
Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,
Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be.
That I may not be so, nor thou belied,
Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Whatever it may be, we may suppose
it is not love, for love must leave its trace
like contraband seized and displayed in rows;
is not sufficient reason to erase
the careful lives we have so far lived through—
there is no call for us to undermine
the walls we've built; no need to think anew
of all the chains and choices that define
us still. And yet for all our fine intent
a single touch ignites the night and tries
resolve past all resisting. What we meant
before we mean again; fidelities
have yet been known to shift and come undone
and all good reasons fail us, one by one.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
In the old neighborhood, each funeral parlor
is more elaborate than the last.
The alleys smell of cops, pistols bumping their thighs,
each chamber steeled with a slim blue bullet.
Low-rent balconies stacked to the sky.
A boy plays tic-tac-toe on a moon
crossed by TV antennae, dreams
he has swallowed a blue bean.
It takes root in his gut, sprouts
and twines upward, the vines curling
around the sockets and locking them shut.
And this sky, knotting like a dark tie?
The patroller, disinterested, holds all the beans.
August. The mums nod past, each a prickly heart on a sleeve.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all too precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write,
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence:
But when your countenance fill’d up his line,
Then lacked I matter; that enfeebled mine.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
I that have been a lover, and could show it,
Though not in these, in rithmes not wholly dumb,
Since I exscribe your sonnets, am become
A better lover, and much better poet.
Nor is my Muse or I ashamed to owe it
To those true numerous graces, whereof some
But charm the senses, others overcome
Both brains and hearts; and mine now best do know it:
For in your verse all Cupid’s armory,
His flames, his shafts, his quiver, and his bow,
His very eyes are yours to overthrow.
But then his mother’s sweets you so apply,
Her joys, her smiles, her loves, as readers take
For Venus’ ceston every line you make.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
O! call not me to justify the wrong
That thy unkindness lays upon my heart;
Wound me not with thine eye, but with thy tongue:
Use power with power, and slay me not by art,
Tell me thou lov’st elsewhere; but in my sight,
Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside:
What need’st thou wound with cunning, when thy might
Is more than my o’erpress’d defence can bide?
Let me excuse thee: ah! my love well knows
Her pretty looks have been mine enemies;
And therefore from my face she turns my foes,
That they elsewhere might dart their injuries:
Yet do not so; but since I am near slain,
Kill me outright with looks, and rid my pain.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Like as a huntsman after weary chase,
Seeing the game from him escap'd away,
Sits down to rest him in some shady place,
With panting hounds beguiled of their prey:
So after long pursuit and vain assay,
When I all weary had the chase forsook,
The gentle deer return'd the self-same way,
Thinking to quench her thirst at the next brook.
There she beholding me with milder look,
Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide:
Till I in hand her yet half trembling took,
And with her own goodwill her firmly tied.
Strange thing, me seem'd, to see a beast so wild,
So goodly won, with her own will beguil'd.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Be still. The Hanging Gardens were a dream
That over Persian roses flew to kiss
The curlèd lashes of Semiramis.
Troy never was, nor green Skamander stream.
Provence and Troubadour are merest lies
The glorious hair of Venice was a beam
Made within Titian’s eye. The sunsets seem,
The world is very old and nothing is.
Be still. Thou foolish thing, thou canst not wake,
Nor thy tears wedge thy soldered lids apart,
But patter in the darkness of thy heart.
Thy brain is plagued. Thou art a frighted owl
Blind with the light of life thou ’ldst not forsake,
And Error loves and nourishes thy soul.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Recall the carousel.
Its round and round.Its pink lights blinking off and on.
The children’s faces painted garish colors againstan institutional wall.
And the genetics.
The We won’t be here too long  ...
Do not step off  ...The carousel?
Do you recall?
As ifwe were our own young parents suffering againafter so many hundreds of hours of bliss.
And even the startling fact that what had always been feared might come to pass:
A familiar sweater in a garbage can.A surgeon bent over our baby, wearing a mask.
But surely you recall how happily and for how longwe watched our pretty hostages go round.
They waved at us too many times to count.Their dancing foals.
Their lacquered mares.
Even a blue-eyed hunting hound was still allowed back then.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
O truant Muse what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dy’d?
Both truth and beauty on my love depends;
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
Make answer Muse: wilt thou not haply say,
‘Truth needs no colour, with his colour fix’d;
Beauty no pencil, beauty’s truth to lay;
But best is best, if never intermix’d’?
Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for’t lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb
And to be prais’d of ages yet to be.
Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how
To make him seem long hence as he shows now.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
At the age of nine, Pa drove me
to the river. The pastor & deacons
awaited. I donned a white robe,
transparent, self-conscious
of my fresh nubs.
Father Jonas reached beneath me,
placed a hand over my nose & mouth.
I resisted.
He pushed me hard until my feet released
& rose to the surface, like a corpse.
I cried afterward, cold & clammy,
wet hair plaited back.
All the men thought I was full
of the Holy Ghost.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault,
And I will comment upon that offence:
Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt,
Against thy reasons making no defence.
Thou canst not love disgrace me half so ill,
To set a form upon desired change,
As I’ll myself disgrace; knowing thy will,
I will acquaintance strangle, and look strange;
Be absent from thy walks; and in my tongue
Thy sweet beloved name no more shall dwell,
Lest I, too much profane, should do it wrong,
And haply of our old acquaintance tell.
For thee, against my self I’ll vow debate,
For I must ne’er love him whom thou dost hate.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
It is not pain that holds me back, but time
With its sad prefigurations and smell,
Its flowers and echoes, rivers and crime.
Even now, without a future, I tell
Myself lies in future tense. As my hair
Thins, I collect combs. When clocks chime, I groan.
The falling world finds pleasure in despair
Because to suffer means to be alone,
And I suffer through all the accidents
Of change as though I were settling a score,
As if to disinvent what death invents.
I once built a castle, now I do chores.
To pass the time I rearrange my things.
To fall asleep I recite names of kings.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
The stone dolls, found in an Egyptian tomb,
are eyeless, armless, heavy for a child
to hold. Not like the dolls that lined the room
my sister and I shared, their bodies light
and made for being bent, their eyelids mobile,
hair that tangled with our own. "At night,"
our father winked at us, "they come to life."
We never pressed our cheeks against cold stone
as pharoah's daughters did. The doctor's knife
could not have caught my sister more off-guard
or left me less alone; I had my dolls.
Though, soon, they lay on tables in the yard
with price tags. Even then they looked alive,
survivors with no sickness to survive.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
How oft when thou, my music, music play’st,
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers when thou gently sway’st
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap,
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,
Whilst my poor lips which should that harvest reap,
At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand!
To be so tickled, they would change their state
And situation with those dancing chips,
O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more bless’d than living lips.
Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.


Compose a sonnet.
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.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
You're presenting me with a telescopic line of reasoning.
You think because one dies then to die must be a good idea.
Let me get this straight. So you think to follow suit is what's
In the cards and the works and the stars. It may be that's
The next step that's clear or it may be there's another way.
You may find a friend for whom to die is not the be-all
Or the end. There were ten rooms and a thousand shelves
And ten thousand bottles filled with ten million tickets. You
Were on the end of the ladder in a blue sky filled with litter.
It was tantamount to a ticker tape parade on the streets of
A stunned city. Staccato ropes couldn't hold you any longer.
And in the evening's sudden stillness I breathed in your ear.
From now on out everything gets said in a whisper. If you like
If you want if you care to come closer. This way is better.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
To all those happy blessings which ye have,
With plenteous hand by heaven upon you thrown:
This one disparagement they to you gave,
That ye your love lent to so meane a one.
Yee whose high worths surpassing paragon,
Could not on earth have found one fit for mate,
Ne but in heaven matchable to none,
Why did ye stoup unto so lowly state.
But ye thereby much greater glory gate,
Then had ye sorted with a princes pere:
For now your light doth more it selfe dilate,
And in my darknesse greater doth appeare.
Yet since your light hath once enlumind me,
With my reflex yours shall encreased be.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Grief dies like joy; the tears upon my cheek
Will disappear like dew. Dear God! I know
Thy kindly Providence hath made it so,
And thank thee for the law. I am too weak
To make a friend of Sorrow, or to wear,
With that dark angel ever by my side
(Though to thy heaven there be no better guide),
A front of manly calm. Yet, for I hear
How woe hath cleansed, how grief can deify,
So weak a thing it seems that grief should die,
And love and friendship with it, I could pray,
That if it might not gloom upon my brow,
Nor weigh upon my arm as it doth now,
No grief of mine should ever pass away.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Like labour-laden moonclouds faint to flee
From winds that sweep the winter-bitten wold,—
Like multiform circumfluence manifold
Of night's flood-tide,—like terrors that agree
Of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea,—
Even such, within some glass dimm'd by our breath,
Our hearts discern wild images of Death,
Shadows and shoals that edge eternity.
Howbeit athwart Death's imminent shade doth soar
One Power, than flow of stream or flight of dove
Sweeter to glide around, to brood above.
Tell me, my heart,—what angel-greeted door
Or threshold of wing-winnow'd threshing-floor
Hath guest fire-fledg'd as thine, whose lord is Love?


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Did a slave song at a master’s bidding
mark Tom while asleep in Charity's womb?
The whole plantation would be called to sing
and dance in Master Epps’ large parlor room—
after work sprung from dawn and dragged past dusk,
after children auctioned to parts unknown,
after funerals and whippings. Thus
was the whim of the patriarch. No groans
allowed, just high steppin’ celebration,
grins all around, gritted or sincere.
Charity threw feet, hips, arms into motion
to please the tyrant piano. Was it here
Tom learned how music can prove the master?
While he spun in a womb of slavish laughter?


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Carried her unprotesting out the door.
Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her,
That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,
The lid's contrition nor the bolts before.
Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise,
She rises in the sunshine. There she goes,
Back to the bars she knew and the repose
In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes.
Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge.
Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,
Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks
Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks
In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge
Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.
I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes.
I write of youth, of love, and have access
By these to sing of cleanly wantonness.
I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece
Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.
I sing of Time's trans-shifting; and I write
How roses first came red, and lilies white.
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab, and of the fairy king.
I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
the difference between a cigarette holder
and cigarette case,the pleasure of a lorgnette over spectacles,
of a fortnight overtwo weeks, of a spiral over graduated stairs,
of the frisson of cryinglike pouty boys, and of the way to walk a lobster
on a leash: drag it,its exoskeleton rapping on the cobbles
through the rabbleof Montparnasse, as if lugging luggage.
We did what could notgain us a week of rent or even a plate of fish,
yet we managed to eatsickening amounts, to hate on our patroness,
the Princess de Polignac,though, and I am sorry, she had bought us wine.
Once, in the chamberbefore an evening concert,
I hid a sack of bees
in the white baby grand,and when ball-gowned Polignac raised the leaf
they swarmed through the stringsto the chandelier and the Princess saw a living sun
and felt a little less drearyand a little less proud of being bored.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Once again you’ve fallen for the lure
of his deferral, his quick eyes’ brightness
slinking from the pantry of the righteous.
Nothing half so sleek as self-licked fur.
Not that he forgot your boots, or left
A single high-aimed compliment unturned.
He’ll double back, affect to be concerned
when he’s the secret reason you’re bereft,
embracing you with his Houdini hold,
repeating chewed-off bits of what you say
so he seems loyal, you the turncoat jay.
You’d think by now you’d learn to be consoled
to know the soul he sold’s not yours but his,
though where yours was a hollow feeling is.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Who I know knows why all those lush-boned worn-out girls are
Whooping at where the moon should be, an eyelid clamped
On its lightness. Nobody sees her without the hoops firing in her
Ears because nobody sees. Tattooed across her chest she claims
Is BRING ME TO WHERE MY BLOOD RUNS and I want that to be here
Where I am her son, pent in blackness and turning the night's calm
Loose and letting the same blood fire through me. In her bomb hair:
Shells full of thunder; in her mouth: the fingers of some calamity,
Somebody foolish enough to love her foolishly. Those who could hear
No music weren't listening—and when I say it, it's like claiming
She's an elegy. It rhymes, because of her, with effigy. Because of her,
If there is no smoke, there is no party. I think of you, Miss Calamity,
Every Sunday. I think of you on Monday. I think of you hurling hurt
Where the moon should be and stomping into our darkness calmly.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor,
Most gracious singer of high poems! where
The dancers will break footing, from the care
Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more.
And dost thou lift this house’s latch too poor
For hand of thine? and canst thou think and bear
To let thy music drop here unaware
In folds of golden fulness at my door?
Look up and see the casement broken in,
The bats and owlets builders in the roof!
My cricket chirps against thy mandolin.
Hush, call no echo up in further proof
Of desolation! there’s a voice within
That weeps . . . as thou must sing . . . alone, aloof.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
We danced to rancorous tunes on spiked ground and
our knees sang with each puncture, so that several
agouti colonies, melanic in our russet strengths,
learned as wild rats to scurry or guard ourselves from
skin-spite. Immune from nocturnal drowsiness
we strong-bellied creatures assembled, campaigned;
gyrated to blowed trumpets and cradled songs, but,
us black rats with our rogue swagger that spoke
of foreign ports, pranced our survival shuffle in
night’s murky dance halls. Each step our single
prayer, each jab our benediction. This tart sermon
containered our septic hurts and lean swaggers. On
the strike of dawn, we skittered from shadows, the
redeemed walking day’s straight-road into warpland.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Love is too young to know what conscience is,
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?
Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,
Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove:
For, thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body’s treason;
My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love; flesh stays no farther reason,
But rising at thy name doth point out thee,
As his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride,
He is contented thy poor drudge to be,
To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.
No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her ‘love,’ for whose dear love I rise and fall.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I see thine image through my tears to-night,
And yet to-day I saw thee smiling.  How
Refer the cause?—Belovëd, is it thou
Or I, who makes me sad?  The acolyte
Amid the chanted joy and thankful rite
May so fall flat, with pale insensate brow,
On the altar-stair.  I hear thy voice and vow,
Perplexed, uncertain, since thou art out of sight,
As he, in his swooning ears, the choir’s amen.
Belovëd, dost thou love? or did I see all
The glory as I dreamed, and fainted when
Too vehement light dilated my ideal,
For my soul’s eyes?  Will that light come again,
As now these tears come—falling hot and real?


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand,
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed will escape my door
But by a yard or two; and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand;
I shall be gone to what I understand,
And happier than I ever was before.
The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung.
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls:
Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,
And o'er the number of thy years.
The mystic glory swims away;
From off my bed the moonlight dies;
And closing eaves of wearied eyes I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray:
And then I know the mist is drawn
A lucid veil from coast to coast,
And in the dark church like a ghost Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but to-day by feeding is allay’d,
To-morrow sharpened in his former might:
So, love, be thou, although to-day thou fill
Thy hungry eyes, even till they wink with fulness,
To-morrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love, with a perpetual dulness.
Let this sad interim like the ocean be
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that when they see
Return of love, more blest may be the view;
Or call it winter, which being full of care,
Makes summer’s welcome, thrice more wished, more rare.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
He brings me chocolate from the Pentagon,
dark chocolates shaped like tanks and fighter jets,
milk chocolate tomahawks, a bonbon
like a kirsch grenade, mint chocolate bayonets.
He brings me chocolate ships, a submarine
descending in a chocolate sea, a drone
unmanned and filled with hazelnut praline.
He brings me cocoa powder, like chocolate blown
to bits. Or chocolate squares of pepper heat.
Or if perhaps we've fought, he brings a box
of truffles home, missiles of semisweet
dissolving on the tongue. He brings me Glocks
and chocolate mines, a tiny transport plane,
a bomb that looks delicious in its cellophane.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Belovëd, my Belovëd, when I think
That thou wast in the world a year ago,
What time I sat alone here in the snow
And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink
No moment at thy voice, but, link by link,
Went counting all my chains as if that so
They never could fall off at any blow
Struck by thy possible hand,—why, thus I drink
Of life’s great cup of wonder!  Wonderful,
Never to feel thee thrill the day or night
With personal act or speech,—nor ever cull
Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white
Thou sawest growing!  Atheists are as dull,
Who cannot guess God’s presence out of sight.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Give me more love or more disdain;
The torrid, or the frozen zone,
Bring equal ease unto my pain;
The temperate affords me none;
Either extreme, of love, or hate,
Is sweeter than a calm estate.
Give me a storm; if it be love,
Like Danae in that golden show'r
I swim in pleasure; if it prove
Disdain, that torrent will devour
My vulture-hopes; and he's possess'd
Of heaven, that's but from hell releas'd.
Then crown my joys, or cure my pain;
Give me more love, or more disdain.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others, but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself, it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
The sun sets behind the market square, and the nettle leaves reflect
the small town’s imperfections.
Teapots whistle in the houses,
like many trains departing simultaneously.
Bonfires flame on meadows and their long sighs
weave above the trees like drifting kites.
The last pilgrims return from the church uncertainly.
TV sets awaken, and instantly know all,
like the demons of Alexandria with swindlers’ swarthy faces.
Knives descend on bread, on sausage, on wood, on offerings.
The sky grows darker; angels used to hide there,
but now it’s just the police sergeant and his dear departed motorcycle.
Rain falls, the cobbled streets grow black.
Little abysses open between the stones.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Where I live      distance is the primal fact
The world is mostly      far away and small
Drifting along through cause and effect      like sleep
As when the distance      unlikeliest of stems
Bears the unlikely      blossom of the wind
Engendering our only weather      dry
Except in winter      pine trees live on snow
So greedy      pulling down these drifts that bury
The fences snap      the trunks of smaller trees
If the forest wants      to go somewhere it spreads
Like a prophecy      its snow before it
Technology      a distant windy cause
There is no philosophy      of death where I live
Only philosophies      of suffering


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
I don’t know what to say to you, neighbor,
as you shovel snow from your part of our street
neat in your Greek black. I’ve waited for
chance to find words; now, by chance, we meet.
We took our boys to the same kindergarten,
thirteen years ago when our husbands went.
Both boys hated school, dropped out feral, dropped in
to separate troubles. You shift snow fast, back bent,
but your boy killed himself, six days dead.
My boy washed your wall when the police were done.
He says, “We weren’t friends?” and shakes his head,
“I told him it was great he had that gun,”
and shakes. I shake, close to you, close to you.
You have a path to clear, and so you do.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Shunning the British tourist bus, we walk,
My child and I, the West Woods where, like dogs
Who know their death is due, the wounded took
Themselves to give up hope. The horror begs
Imagining—the soldiers hauling limbs
Hacked off or messmates dead, and everywhere,
Mixed with the summer scent of swelling plums,
A stench of putrid flesh and burning hair.
Here Lee was turned. That night the forest filled
With muttered names of loved ones left, and cries
From mangled soldiers pleading to be killed.
Seeing my distant look, my daughter tries
My sleeve: “What is it, what?” she asks, and I
Say “nothing, nothing”—though “nothing” is a lie.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
banging around in a cigarette      she isn’t “in love”
my dream a drink with Ira Hayes we discuss the code of the west
my hands make love to my body when my arms are around you
you never tell me your name
and I am forced to write “belly” when I mean “love”
Au revoir, scene!
I waken, read, write long letters and
wander restlessly when leaves are blowing
my dream a crumpled horn
in advance of the broken arm
she murmurs of signs to her fingers
weeps in the morning to waken so shackled with love
Not me. I like to beat people up.
My dream a white tree


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
’Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d,
When not to be receives reproach of being;
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deem’d
Not by our feeling, but by others’ seeing:
For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts, my deeds must not be shown;
Unless this general evil they maintain,
All men are bad and in their badness reign.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Why is it, in Bristol Bay, a sea cormorant
hovers, sings a two-fold song with a hinged cover
for a mouth, teeth set in sockets, with a hissing grind
of spikelets biting the air? Dip one.
The lips of vanished flames in lava coals
glow vermillion as an egg cracks. Dip two.
She/I feel/s a chimera leaving the eider duck. Dip three.
While still in the embryo, separating the body
from death she/I smell/s of arsenic, the Chugach Range
in unnatural bitterness. Why is it, man’s/woman’s nerve scarcely
stifled and sane, comes to prey? While they swoon
minerals of crude oil and sea spiders for tricking a way for gold.
Will they crawl around her/me, sink their eyeteeth in the sea,
ravaging the ecosphere and the ore gold for fuel. Drill.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
I thank you, kind and best beloved friend,
With the same thanks one murmurs to a sister,
When, for some gentle favor, he hath kissed her,
Less for the gifts than for the love you send,
Less for the flowers, than what the flowers convey;
If I, indeed, divine their meaning truly,
And not unto myself ascribe, unduly,
Things which you neither meant nor wished to say,
Oh! tell me, is the hope then all misplaced?
And am I flattered by my own affection?
But in your beauteous gift, methought I traced
Something above a short-lived predilection,
And which, for that I know no dearer name,
I designate as love, without love’s flame.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
The Augsburg poet once said he had tacked
an image of the Man of Doubt
to the wall of his room. A Chinese print.
The image asked: how ought one to act?
I have a photo on my wall. Twenty years ago
seven Chinese workers looked into my lens.
They look wary or ironic or tense.
They know I do not write for them. I know
they didn’t live for me. Yet sometimes I feel
I’m being asked for more candid words,
more credible deeds, by their doubtfulness.
In turn I ask their help in making visible
the contradictions and identities among us.
If there’s a point, it’s this.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Where art thou Muse that thou forget’st so long,
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spend’st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?
Return forgetful Muse, and straight redeem,
In gentle numbers time so idly spent;
Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem
And gives thy pen both skill and argument.
Rise, resty Muse, my love’s sweet face survey,
If Time have any wrinkle graven there;
If any, be a satire to decay,
And make time’s spoils despised every where.
Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life,
So thou prevent’st his scythe and crooked knife.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
It is snowing in southwest Michigan.
Such weather is unusual so late.
The trees are squirting buds that advocate
For green profusions that yesterday began
To grunt and poke and strain toward full-blown spring.
Now fleeced, the trees are January stark.
Though clocks, sprung forward, hedge against the dark,
We hear the arias our miseries sing
When darkness is a slave to all that white.
If global warming is the fangs of doom
I see its poison wafting, from this room.
The future will be mottled if not bright.
Perhaps I’ll die before the killing trend.
I hear my children’s voices on this wind.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-liv'd Phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one more heinous crime:
O, carve not with the hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen!
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong
My love shall in my verse ever live young.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Amazing to believe that nothingness
Surrounds us with delight and lets us be,
And that the meekness of nonentity,
Despite the friction of the world of sense,
Despite the leveling of violence,
Is all that matters. All the energy
We force into the matchhead and the city
Explodes inside a loving emptiness.
Not Dante’s rings, not the Zen zero’s mouth,
Out of which comes and into which light goes,
This God recedes from every metaphor,
Turns the hardest data into untruth,
And fills all blanks with blankness. This love shows
Itself in absence, which the stars adore.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
your black inscriptions cite a kino lau,
whose feathered wingspan, nighttime eyes & pun-
ishing beak comprise mo‘okū‘auhau.
w/my oiled hands, I greet her, w/hun-
gering for mo‘opuna. “mai,” she says,
reciting from your thigh. “mai, mai e ‘ai.”
I have traveled from Maui a lizard, mes-
merized by dreams of ‘ōhi‘a & ai-
kāne, lizard filled w/smoke. arrived, I eat
transforming in the forest of your grand-
mother’s memory: from lizard: woman
dreaming: licking tattoo: permission land:
skin. traveling the night of your kino
to sleep your thighs, ho‘āo, ho‘āo, and wake.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
It's not about the sex, really, it's not
the ache of the bruised nipple or the burn
left by his two-day-old beard in the crook
of my neck where the pulse is taken, it's
his breathing when asleep that draws me near.
When I was seventeen, I'd check beside me,
hope I hadn't rolled and squashed flat
my one-year-old brother. His sigh on my ear,
the rise and fall of air beneath his ribs,
was a miracle to me. The nightly
surprise of what I saw under the bulb's
dim glow: I saw the small heart beating
like wings unfolding in the body. Here,
with this man, ideas of flight return.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Now is before he was born. Days of air
shaken by bees, crow song probing eaves
and quays. Maker of the future a perfect
terra-cotta tense, a tense which sings.
The absence of push in his education
was unpresaged by the door’s lack of wired
Sesame. He waits and waits for egress.
The door needs only his touch.
Its only desire is to swing. He waits
for it to open itself, as the cloud
opens for the melting press of the sun.
He is ready to rot where he leans, leaving
a breeze-blown blemish long after he has arrived.
Long before he has come into being.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
The weary yeare his race now having run,
The new begins his compast course anew:
With shew of morning mylde he hath begun,
Betokening peace and plenty to ensew.
So let us, which this chaunge of weather vew,
Chaunge eeke our mynds and former lives amend,
The old yeares sinnes forepast let us eschew,
And fly the faults with which we did offend.
Then shall the new yeares joy forth freshly send,
Into the glooming world his gladsome ray:
And all these stormes which now his beauty blend,
Shall turne to caulmes and tymely cleare away.
So likewise love cheare you your heavy spright,
And chaunge old yeares annoy to new delight.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
And wilt thou have me fashion into speech
The love I bear thee, finding words enough,
And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough,
Between our faces, to cast light on each?—
I drop it at thy feet.  I cannot teach
My hand to hold my spirits so far off
From myself—me—that I should bring thee proof
In words, of love hid in me out of reach.
Nay, let the silence of my womanhood
Commend my woman-love to thy belief,—
Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed,
And rend the garment of my life, in brief,
By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude,
Lest one touch of this heart convey its grief.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel — every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more or less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
The unsympathetic wind, how she has evaded me for years now,
leaving a guileless shell and no way to navigate. Once when I stood
on a plateau of earth just at the moment before the dangerous,
jutting peaks converged upon the lilting sway of grasslands, I almost
found a way back. There, the sky, quite possibly all the elements,
caused the rock and soil and vegetation to congregate. Their prayer
was not new and so faint I could hardly discern. Simple remembrances,
like a tiny, syncopated chorus calling everyone home: across
a thousand eastward miles, and what little wind was left at my back.
But I could not move. And then the music was gone.
All that was left were the spring time faces of mountains, gazing down,
their last patches of snow, luminous. I dreamed of becoming snow melt,
gliding down the slope and in to the valley. With the promise,
an assurance, that there is always a way to become bird, tree, water again.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
My Love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congeal’d with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action: and till action, lust
Is perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest, to have extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy propos’d; behind a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
I fear dispersal but the resounding really sounds may be full of echo
or echolocation for the next round
Eye rowed in the guest book of God my many sacred tongues
body and bow
Fingers spell now all the spaces I open
You now verse now open oh pen
Cacti quiver for a century
In the desert I swam myself earthword to know
No time on earth and no breath no dearth
Hollowed out into architecture eternal
Who argues with rhyme or snow
Who knows the space in your here
The space in the storm so finely bowed
The space in snow no one nears


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Nature remains
faithful by
natural light,only.
Immeasurable,
invisible in the wind.
Visible whenblades
and branches bend.
The windspeaks fluent
rain.
Despite it
the rainfalls straight.
And beyond itabandoned barns
defend
abandonedmen.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Costa Rica
I finally find the witch. She is branch-
boned, old, with knowing fingers.
She says nothing. Walks me to a tall tree,
a gourd hanging from a long line of jute.
She pulls out a phone, asks me to type
a note to my family. I do it, but can’t see
how it can be sent from somewhere
so deep. She scolds me, says that only
tourists think the world can be escaped.
The jungle’s green is the wild mind
of God. The witch puts the phone into
the gourd. Hand-over-hand, she raises
this cradle to the top of the holy canopy.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
In the early afternoon my mother
was doing the dishes. I climbed
onto the kitchen table, I suppose
to play, and fell asleep there.
I was drowsy and awake, though,
as she lifted me up, carried me
on her arms into the living room,
and placed me on the davenport,
but I pretended to be asleep
the whole time, enjoying the luxury—
I was too big for such a privilege
and just old enough to form
my only memory of her carrying me.
She’s still moving me to a softer place.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Stripped in a flamedance, the bluff backing our houses
quivered in wet-black skin. A shawl of haze tugged tight
around the starkness. We could have choked on August.
Smoke thick in our throats, nearly naked as the earth,
we played bare feet over the heat caught in asphalt.
Could we, green girls, have prepared for this? Yesterday,
we played in sand-carpeted caves. The store we built
sold broken bits of ice plant, empty snail shells, leaves.
Our school’s walls were open sky. We reeled in wonder
from the hills, oblivious to the beckoning
crescendo and to our parent’s hushed communion.
When our bluff swayed into the undulation, we ran
into the still streets of our suburb, feet burning
against a fury that we did not know was change.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Has it turned out we’ve wasted our time?
We’ve wasted our time.
Our magnificent bodies on the dissecting table.
Our day after tomorrow.
Our what to do now.
The stink of us so undignified.
The end game of bloom.
We will lose the sun
struck and disassembled
lightly down and crawling like a worm.
This earth it is a banquet and laid on its table we.
A puncture in the wound room, crude and obvious.
The raving lunatics they are upon us,
but we are raving too.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Your love and pity doth the impression fill,
Which vulgar scandal stamp’d upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o’er-green my bad, my good allow?
You are my all-the-world, and I must strive
To know my shames and praises from your tongue;
None else to me, nor I to none alive,
That my steel’d sense or changes right or wrong.
In so profound abysm I throw all care
Of others’ voices, that my adder’s sense
To critic and to flatterer stopped are.
Mark how with my neglect I do dispense:
You are so strongly in my purpose bred,
That all the world besides methinks are dead.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
each  night  I  count  ghostlets  of  how  my  body  was
wanted  /  behind with deadheading  /  rose hips have
come  /  behind with actions that count only  /  when
the  timing  is  right  /  I  took out  a contract  /  it was
imprudent  in  value  /  behind  with  asepsis  /  hello
microbes  of  my  body  /  we   sleep  together  /  hello
cats  /  I  make  my  bed  daily  /  of the three types of
hair on the sheets  /  only one is human  /  I count the
bedrooms  /  I never had sex in  /  but there were cars
/   wild    woods   /   blackfly    has    got   to   all   the
nasturtiums  /  you cannot dig  up  a grapevine  /  and
expect shelter to come  /  I am touched by  your letter
/  writes  a  friend  /   you  prevaricate  desire   /   says
message  /  all  this  fucking  / with  no  hands  on  me


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Why am I if I am uncertain reasons may inclose.
Remain remain propose repose chose.
I call carelessly that the door is open
Which if they may refuse to open
No one can rush to close.
Let them be mine therefor.
Everybody knows that I chose.
Therefor if therefore before I close.
I will therefore offer therefore I offer this.
Which if I refuse to miss may be miss is mine.
I will be well welcome when I come.
Because I am coming.
Certainly I come having come.
These stanzas are done.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
She turns the bedlamp on. The book falls open
in her mottled hands, and while she reads
her mouth begins to quiver, forming words
like Breathless. Promises. Elope.
As she turns the leaves, Eudora's cheek
takes on a bit of bloom. Her frowzy hair
thickens and turns gold, her dim eyes clear,
the wattles vanish from her slender neck.
Her waist, emerging from its ring of flesh,
bends to the side. Breasts that used to hang
like pockets rise and ripen; her long legs
tremble. Her eyes close, she holds her breath—
the steamy pages flutter by, unread,
as lover after lover finds her bed.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
The world weeps. There are no tears
To be found. It is deemed a miracle.
The president appears on screens
In villages and towns, in cities in jungles
And jungles still affectionately called cities.
He appears on screens and reads a story.
Whose story is he reading and why?
What lessons are to be learned from this story
About a time that has not arrived, will not arrive, is here?
Time of fire and images of fire climbing toward the sun
Time of precious and semi-precious liquids
Time of a man and a woman doused in ink
Rolling across streams and down valleys
Trying to leave some string of words behind.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Even C.P. Cavafy–
cynical, ascetic,
unknown in his day–
printed at his own expense
poems no one would publish,
poems intimate, personal,
to share with readers
he called friends.
But I have hundreds of poems
hidden away in a box.
Even when I know
Cavafy once wrapped verse
with black and gold ribbons
to give away as a gift.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Is it thy will, thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?
Is it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee
So far from home into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenure of thy jealousy?
O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great:
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake:
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,
To play the watchman ever for thy sake:
For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
From me far off, with others all too near.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Before clock hands showed the time
time ceased, and looking glasses
were veiled as if they still held
familiar faces, in those
last moments when breath shallowed
like a wellspring running dry,
God-words quickened, only then
the dying left death-beds borne
on the arms of the gathered,
lowered to the floor so they
might press close, as though a door
through which to listen and know
the earth's old secrets before
it opened, and they entered.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Why speak of hate, when I do bleed for love?
Not hate, my love, but Love doth bite my tongue
Till I taste stuff that makes my rhyming rough
So flatter I my fever for the one
For whom I inly mourn, though seem to shun.
A rose is arrows is eros, so what
If I confuse the shade that I’ve become
With winedark substance in a lover’s cup?
But stop my tonguely wound, I’ve bled enough.
If I be fair, or false, or freaked with fear
If I my tongue in lockèd box immure
Blame not me, for I am sick with love.
Yet would I be your friend most willingly
Since friendship would infect me killingly.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authórizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are:
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense—
Thy adverse party is thy advocate—
And ‘gainst myself a lawful plea commence.
Such civil war is in my love and hate,
That I an áccessory needs must be
To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow’st,
In one of thine, from that which thou departest;
And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st,
Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest,
Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase;
Without this folly, age, and cold decay:
If all were minded so, the times should cease
And threescore year would make the world away.
Let those whom nature hath not made for store,
Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish:
Look, whom she best endow’d, she gave thee more;
Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:
She carv’d thee for her seal, and meant thereby,
Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.


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


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Below the gardens and the darkening pines
The living water sinks among the stones,
Sinking yet foaming till the snowy tones
Merge with the fog drawn landward in dim lines.
The cloud dissolves among the flowering vines,
And now the definite mountain-side disowns
The fluid world, the immeasurable zones.
Then white oblivion swallows all designs.
But still the rich confusion of the sea,
Unceasing voice, sombre and solacing,
Rises through veils of silence past the trees;
In restless repetition bound, yet free,
Wave after wave in deluge fresh releasing
An ancient speech, hushed in tremendous ease.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Last time I had stamina and calluses and a bag of chalk.
It hung from my lumbar like a bunny tail.
Last time I was lighter and the ether better-emptied.
Now blood is so close to my surface I slip off the walls.
Tonight is the night of a massacre I do not look at.
Although I have been to that city of bricks and black blooms.
Therein I kissed a grave a million others kissed.
A woman with a cigarette asked me for fire there and I provided it.
I had been asked for light before but never fire.
Tonight I climb three hundred stairs toward the light of my device.
Maybe we’ll be wartime people leading wartime lives.
Skirmishes have sprung from the heads of lesser gods.
This is the light no one reads by we just stare into it.
We wait for the glyphs that mean it is safe.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
My own Belovëd, who hast lifted me
From this drear flat of earth where I was thrown,
And, in betwixt the languid ringlets, blown
A life-breath, till the forehead hopefully
Shines out again, as all the angels see,
Before thy saving kiss!  My own, my own,
Who camest to me when the world was gone,
And I who looked for only God, found thee!
I find thee; I am safe, and strong, and glad.
As one who stands in dewless asphodel,
Looks backward on the tedious time he had
In the upper life,—so I, with bosom-swell,
Make witness, here, between the good and bad,
That Love, as strong as Death, retrieves as well.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
O! for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdu’d
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renew’d;
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink,
Potions of eisel ’gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance, to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye,
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
As Hermes once took to his feathers light,
When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and slept,
So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright
So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft
The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;
And seeing it asleep, so fled away,
Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies,
Nor unto Tempe where Jove griev’d that day;
But to that second circle of sad Hell,
Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows—pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.