Mountain in Winter (Paul Klee), Sonnet #545

In Farewell to 2020

The mountains are covered with salt,

Withering the conifer,

Sealing up crevasse and fault,

Petrifying deer femur.

Ragged peaks are crystallized,

Great rhomboids of quartz and calcite —

The imperfect reimagined right,

Its sterility realized.

I ask you, what then is to come,

Or is this all, the obvious end?

Blink! Don’t confuse all with a sum

Of the tatters we cannot mend.

Silently it falls, the slow,

Inexorable, failing snow. 

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here:

My Human Disguise.

Joshua Tree (Julia Guerin), Sonnet #516

The Spanish called it the “desert dagger,”

Isote de desierto — Mormons

May have given it the biblical name.

One name implies a dangerous swagger,

The other a religious leader’s palms.

To the tree they are one and the same.

A desert, already half dead, can die.

It needs frost and water, but not too much.

I walk from tree to tree to tree and try

To reach high up enough and lightly touch

The dark green tapered and serrated leaves.

I often prick fingers, sometimes draw blood

(The pain doesn’t know and yet it believes) —

A drop in the sand releases a flood.

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here:

My Human Disguise.

Triamphibiangle (David Birkey), Sonnet #218

The leopard, the tiger, and the lion frog
Have been the silent, devoted sentries
Of the last point-balanced triangle log
Longer than the countable centuries.
We might prefer to call the log a tree
As there is certainly a symmetry
To the branches, which do leaf out each spring;
Like faded memories, they quickly fall,
The last shudders of a nearly dead thing.
The frogs believe the balancing is all.
They live, first small, in the perilous gap
Beneath shorn bark that drips a mist of sap,
Then, grown, they form a protective cordon,
To wait and watch for any threat from men.

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