Spring Platitudes
Sonnet for two voices
“Never thought he’d do this on a spring day,
not when the house is paid for and us kids
are off his hands; filling time’s easy – hey,
he could have got started on all those weeds!
Today’s most definitely one for getting
out there, for getting stuck in; no sense is
there, just staring through the window, letting
time go by, rather than fix those fences.”
“It’s the bookmark feeling that’s put him out:
flat as a pressed flower in a tiresome book –
like when you open the garden door that
lets in the smell of blossom and sets you back
another year – he’s just marking the last
chapter at the point where people get lost.”
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© Nemo 2020
Views: 1058
I like the second half apart from bookmark and book so close together which jars for me. I find the rhythm of this difficult. Don’t know a lot about sonnets other than they tend to read beautifully. I’ve never attempted to comment on your poetry before because whilst I’ve enjoyed bits of them I could never quite fathom clearly what was actually going on. Anyways I just wanted to pop in so you know that at least I’m interested in your stuff. Cheers albert 🙂
Thanks for commenting, Albert. My aim in this poem was to have two siblings talking about their depressed father, so normal speech patterns were required rather than pretty tum-tee-tum rhythms. i agree the repetition of ‘book’ might jar but it is acceptable in ordinary speech, surely? Besides I had set myself the challenge to stick to a sonnet rhyme scheme and to make it as unobtrusive as possible, hence having to have a word to half-rhyme with ‘back.’ Cheers, Gerald.