Monday, September 12, 2016

Elise's Draft Sonnet

Share it Please
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.
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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.

2 comments:

  1. 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.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I 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

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