Sonnettics

You will call it eternity’s pentameter and I will let it pass through you as if it were never separate
You will try to count and find nothing resisting you no number standing apart from what it names
You are the iamb of a howl that leaves no trace of sound the measure already dissolved in its speaking
When you reach for the turn there is only continuation what you call change has never left itself
When you name the couplet the second voice is already within the first no division holds long enough to be heard
Fourteen does not arrive it was never apart from the whole what you anticipate is already everywhere
Do not try to finish the song it has no edge to meet you no boundary where it would become complete
The line does not end it does not begin it does not distinguish itself from what it moves through
You are not missing anything nothing has been removed nothing was set aside to return
I made you from what does not appear and what does not appear remains not hidden not absent simply without edge or mark

The maple sap flows every March you see
Some years it's just a little, some alot
The winter freezes sap, the spring sets free
We tap our trees to see how much we've got
Our trees are “breathing” maple, freeze and thaw
That's how the sap arises through the wood
This year we tap the trees then watch in awe
With thanks the sap is flowing pretty good
The sugarhouses fill with maple’s sap
Takes forty gallons sap to make one sweet
That difference is quite a hefty gap
Who cares! It makes my pancakes nice to eat
At Hebron’s Maple Festival, I’m told
We celebrate our liquid maple gold!

I hear the wind, it screeches loud as death
A sound the cuts the graveyard’s solemn stones
I only hear the sharp and vicious breath
It whips aloud in living shrieks and moans
The wind proceeds to yell in ghastly screams
It seeks to cut the bricks that make the walls
Each wall remembers every brick that seems
To hold it up before it breaks and falls
A wind that blows through bricks, that screams and cuts
That’s not a normal wind, it knows the way
To turn against the strength the wall abuts
And call itself the song of judgement day
The beauty of the song that tears what’s still
Becomes belief in all it seeks to kill.

Imago Dei, the Truth that Thou art God
The Truth that Thou art God, Imago Dei
The image by which everyone is awed
The awe which never fades nor goes away

The church will only speak with words that cost
With words which you must pay for, not these words
These words the church is hopeful you have lost
Or chased away, like noisy little birds

But noisy little birds are more than this
They do not sow, and neither do they reap
And yet, they sound as if they were in bliss
As if the words they’ve found are theirs to keep

So be a bird and keep these words today
Tomorrow and repeat, Imago Dei.

This sonnet was submitted to an online journal and received a nearly instant rejection:

Dear Scott Ennis,

Sonnet received, but I can tell you now that it will not find a place on The Sonnet Scroll/Poetry Porch.

Do you have others that you might submit?

Joyce Wilson, Editor

How fitting, that the page is clean and white
I’ll try my best to stain it carefully
I don’t think it will hurt, but then it might
Is pain the way to tell the words they’re free?

Dichotomous, the sonnet is a cage
A prison made of fourteen bars of verse
A metaphor that marks the virgin page
The virgin sonnet could be something worse

Imagine if the words became a song
A lyric made of thin iambic flesh
A page that’s torn, that’s neither right nor wrong
Within a book that functions as a creche

A virgin sonnet only til it’s read
A couplet to replace the maidenhead.

Salvation is escape from this cruel world
It doesn’t come by death, that’s not the way
This poem bears the truth you seek, unfurled
It tells its tale; it knows the word to say

The word is god; you’ve heard that said before
Yes Jesus knew the way we must break free
But then the church arose, became the whore
And people then forgot divinity

The knowledge that exists within the soul
Remember this: within you are divine
You’ve always been the light you would extol
The knowledge in your heart, a welcome sign

Awaken the reality you know
Ascend beyond the faith that dwells below.

And the multitude gathered by the lakeside, murmuring one to another concerning the sayings of the scribes. Some spake of his miracles, and others derided him, saying, “Is this not but a deceiver?” And the Pharisees drew nigh, their robes long, their countenances stern.
Then Jesus lifted up his eyes unto them, and spake, saying, “Wherefore dost thou question what thou seest? Shall the words of men endure, or the works of God stand forever?”
And the people murmured, and some were amazed. And he said unto them, “Verily, what is done shall stand; but what is spoken shall pass away.”
And he went among them, laying hands upon the sick, and blessing the children. And they departed whole, and the little ones laughed. But the murmuring of the scribes waxed not still. Yet the truth of his works abode before them.

The billionaire wanted immortality, but he wanted it priced correctly.

Paintings were too fungible, yachts too wet, and buildings too full of other people’s names. Words, though—words could be made rare. So he announced, over lunch on a terrace above the city, that he would commission the most expensive sonnet ever written. 

One million dollars per line. Fourteen lines. A monument of cash and cadence.

They found him a sonneteer living quietly in a rent-controlled apartment, someone whose poems were admired in whispers and reviewed with qualifiers. The sonneteer listened, nodded once, and asked only to be paid as the poem progressed. The billionaire, amused, agreed.

The first quatrain arrived handwritten on thick paper. It spoke of time, ambition, and men who tried to purchase permanence. The billionaire read it twice, pleased, and transferred four million dollars.

The second quatrain followed, tighter, sharper, turning the poem inward. Power became weight; wealth became gravity. Another four million dollars changed hands.

The third quatrain took longer. During that delay, markets shuddered. When it finally arrived, the stanza was mercilessly beautiful, suggesting that excess itself was a kind of blindness. The billionaire paid another four million dollars, pride now sharing space with unease.

Then the crash came.

Accounts froze mid-transaction. Valuations revised themselves downward until they meant nothing at all. When the billionaire finally reached the sonneteer, there was a pause on the line long enough to feel like calculation.

He could not afford what remained of the poem.

“A sonnet,” the sonneteer said gently, “ends with a couplet.”

The billionaire looked at the twelve flawless lines before him—each one purchased, each one certain. He could not bear to leave the poem unfinished. So he declined the final commission and picked up a pen himself.

He wrote the last two lines late at night. They obeyed the rules without understanding them. They rhymed, but only just. When set beneath the others, the poem closed, but imperfectly, like a door made to measure for someone else.

Later readers would marvel at the brilliance of the opening twelve lines, then hesitate at the end, sensing the change in voice, the thinning of insight.

And there, in the couplet he could not buy, the billionaire left his truest signature: the moment money lost its meter.

The memory of truth comes rushing in
There’s more to life than stories we’ve been told
Repentance isn’t overcoming sin
It’s transformation found like veins of gold

The gold that’s found within the waking heart
Shines brighter than the gold on temple spires
It knows where it belongs; it knows its part
It recognizes all your needs, desires

Like Mary of Magdala found the place
Where resurrection means that one is free
She turned and stayed in quiet simple grace
She knew that truth was simply meant to be

And we can find it too, this sacred art
Within an open mind and open heart.