Alarm Sounding

Today I addressed another P&W prompt (picked up from Angelspeak). 

Write a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem made up, typically, of three stanzas of four lines, and a fourth of two lines, or a couplet. Use the following rhyme scheme: In each of the first three stanzas, rhyme the first and third lines and the second and fourth lines (a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d, e, f, e, f); and rhyme the lines of the couplet (g, g). For a traditional example, see Shakespeare’s ”From you have I been absent in the spring….”For a contemporary example, see Denis Johnson’s ”Heat.”

For the record, I really dislike this prompt. Sonnets – what a pain in the butt. Really. I spent more than a hour counting and recounting feet of poetry on my fingers while trying to think of rhymes that didn’t sound silly. I’m not sure I succeeded. I will, no doubt, re-write this poem to capture something much better in the near future. (Note – this reads better if you add a brief caesura after the word stillness of line 5.)

Alarm Sounding

The silent snowy hills of arctic light

are full of trees immeas’rable in worth

The summer days leave so few hours of night

or living things to walk upon this earth.

Through stillness now suddenly emerges

the sound of living earth, it tears and rends

Earth shattering, through stone and rock surges

a force that more than mother natures bends.

The cry – the breaking of an arctic shelf

a severing of earth sounds the alarm

a crime on nature in and of itself

a thing it seems no living thing could harm

A crime that we should kill the wilderness

by living lives that venture to excess.

Comments are welcome, as always.