September 17, 2007

• Sonnet

  All we need is fourteen lines, well thirteen now,
  and after this one just a dozen
  to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,
  then only ten more left like rows of beans.
  How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
  and insist the iambic bongos must be played
  and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
  one for every station of the cross.
  But hang on here while we make the turn
  into the final six where all will be resolved,
  where longing an heartache will find an end,
  where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
  take off those crazy medieval tights,
  blowout the lights, and come at last to bed.

  ~  Billy Collins

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