Here’s a sonnet I wrote a few days ago. IF you know anything about sonnets, this one has an unusual rhyme scheme while still fulfilling, so far as I can tell, all the requirements of a sonnet: One octet followed by one sestet with a volt or turn around line nine. The subject is unusual and very modern. Rather than focusing on the exploits of some cruel love, I have taken as a point of departure the crash, or the myth of the crash, at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. I think of it as a rather sad poem, a little like Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” in a certain way, without claiming to be the poet that Matthew Arnold is. Enjoy, if you will.
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Roswell
O, Flung across the darkness, dust, despair
of starplains thrummed with poison light, you came
so trillions far from world of surging heart-fast air,
you pilgrims grey; the void expunged your name,
and so you crashed on desert rolling rare
around a yellow sun, its bluest earth
alight with eyes so heaven-turned, they bear
the hope of twins betrayed, betwained at birth:
to join again, to build a solar firth.
Instead, you fell from hectic flashing skies,
exploding ship a silver sun eclipse.
O, what is lost, what flashing mortal mirth
betrayed when pilgrim tumbles down and dies?
A silence now: the void annoints our lips.