Alone he waits while men work
hurriedly.
With dusty hair and bloodied face,
in grief,
In pain, in shock, awaiting tragedy,
He sits. And there can be no
disbelief
About a world of ash-filled skies
and pain,
Where brothers die and daughters
are demeaned.
In this world, blackened rocks and
dead terrain
Are common. Bloodstains and unholy
scenes
Surround a people fighting for
release;
Release from hate and from
calamity.
But time and time again it isn’t
peace
That comes off conqueror. It’s
entropy.
There’s
something wrong with how we could forget
About
a boy whose playmates are now dead.
********
I wanted to write a sonnet with an entirely different tone than what we have been reading. I wrote it in response to the viral video/image of the little boy in Aleppo whose village had been bombed.
Writing sonnets is incredibly difficult for me. I did not want the poem to sound sing-songy, but instead I feel like it sounds clunky and forced instead. I ran into a lot of trouble with the rhymes, and I'm afraid I used enjambment just to get said rhymes. It seems pretty contrived. Punctuation was also difficult.
It's true your sonnet isn't super sing-songy, but I feel the clunkyness fits the tone, and subject well. I might remove the coma after tragedy in line 2, and add a coma in line 10 after hate.
ReplyDeleteI think that in line 7 the iambic pentameter might be off because the stressed word is "in," not "this." But I could be wrong; I don't really have an ear for it.
ReplyDelete