Three Searching Sonnets

February

Through dark desponding earth a shoot erupts,

Seeking the pale elixir of the sun;
Last autumn’s fruit gone shrivelled, foul, corrupts –
And what cannot be tamed has now begun.

Behind the window at a roaring fire,

His mind persuaded by a stupid book,
A man as certain as a practised liar
Stews gently in his self-responsive look.

If now a something like the Second Coming,

Merged with that old unnerving repetition,
Were to disturb him in his tuneless humming,
Would he, all certainties destroyed by splendour,
Embrace that fireball in a risky wonder,
Or turn his page, content with sour suspicion?

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Time and Again

Approaching time and time again that place

Where Someone with astounding knowledge kept
His dwelling, the seething burn of my face
Drove me away unshriven. And I slept.

Then, on a promenade caught in the teeth

Of a gale I saw the smile of an Adept.
I ran. Thoughtful, he turned a corner beneath
A cauldron sky. The street was empty. I wept.

Now in a stony place where a faint light

Like an injured bird led me and died, I sit
Upon a rock and hear the wind declaim
A litany of no point and no name.
Instead, my pulse, unruly, bit by bit
Taps out, “This is your madness. Or your Darkest Night.”

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“After a Winter...”

After a winter of fanatic grey,

Abrupt winds, stone-hard ground and jaundiced light;
After a season when each stunted day
Thankfully wallowed in the flesh of night,

I cherish with a chilly hand a bud

Struggling as any infant does to sip
The broth of the sun, bask in the warming mud,
Tasting the salt of newness on my lip.

So, restless at my desk, playing with words,

I dumbly search for that elusive trope
Which, Spring-like, might transfix this plod of time,
Transfigure meaning to a flock of birds
Flung to the right in similes of hope,
Dangerously breasting over snares of lime.

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© January 1983