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.