How to Write a Sonnet

First: seize the world as your subject matter.
Understand that its grids, its grit, its effluvial patterns
can be shaped into fourteen unwavering lines. Next,
imagine that you’re M. Buonarrati, acquiring a chunk of granite
so pearlsheened, translucent, you glimpse beneath its stippled ice
a magnificent something struggling to draw its first painwracked breaths.
Then, tap with your icepick, scratch with your pencil
the imperfect surface, crack and dig, scribble and mutilate
until the ephemeral entity you claim as your progeny
pushes out drenched and wet, slippery and hot-bloodied,
a beautiful being you savor balanced on the roughnesses of your two
cradling palms, in the recesses of your multileveled mind that created it.

Wild Transitions Contents