Terri Brown-Davidson – Ⅴ
How to Write a Great Sonnet
First: seize the world as your subject matter.
Understand that its grids, its grit, its effluvial patterns
can be shaped into fourteen unwavering lines. Next,
imagine that you’re M. Buonarrati, acquiring a chunk of granite
so pearlsheened, translucent, you glimpse beneath its stippled ice
a magnificent something struggling to draw its first pain-wracked breaths.
Then, tap with your ice-pick, scratch with your pencil
the imperfect surface, crack and dig, scribble and mutilate
until the ephemeral entity you claim as your progeny
pushes out drenched and wet, slippery and hot-bloodied,
a beautiful being you savor balanced on the roughnesses of your two
cradling palms, in the recesses of your multileveled mind that
created it.