When love blossoms, it isn’t a flower
Picked from the earth and ready to wither.
Rather, love gardens to keep its power.
Where blooms wilt or roots rot, love goes thither.
Love plucks the dead parts, brings what’s lacking, mends.
Attend likewise to every living part
That ever, slowly, to the sunlight bends,
Whether it be a limb, a spine, a heart.
Mind petals, but also what thorns they wield
And know that they sting for a good reason.
Mind cultivation over what fruits yield
And so come to know the greenest season.
Love is work, but its done like keeping friends.
Do it right and you’ll find it never ends.
4 Comments
I wrote this poem during the week preceeding my friends’ wedding. I’ve never been compelled to write something so traditional as a sonnet before, but considering the formality of a wedding, I thought it might be the right thing to do. The groom talked me into reading the sonnet as a toast, at the reception.
I found, while writing the sonnet, that it was too difficult to do in one sitting, but that during my time away from the poem, things would change, and certain parts would come more easily than others on certain days.
Those last two lines, they aren’t quite a “turn” and yes, I know that I’ve broken the traditional rhyme scheme with them. ALthough I’ve already given this poem to its intended audience, I think there might yet be some work to do on it.
that’s beautiful. interesting to see you write in a definate style that is so strict. but it works. and just goes to show you can do anything. which i always knew anyway.
Beautiful, SD
The sonneteer is the wedding singer of modern poetry: a member of the bride’s party by way of technicality, he is never embraced and rarely photographed. More entertainer than poet, more trickster than artisan, he welcomes the casual onlooker and –in a supreme affront to the “vitality” of the art– will don a bright red nose and big floppy rhymes to provoke a laugh. Freed of the prerogatives of the tradition, he is the dumb, plodding beast laboring beneath critic Harold Bloom